A Rogers outage in Canada is affecting phone, internet, and mobile users nationwide

Canadian telecom Rogers is suffering a major outage affecting landline phones, cellular connections, and internet connectivity throughout Canada that started early this morning. The outage has also disconnected Interac, the network Canadian banks use, disabling debit cards, ATMs, and the e-Transfer services that recently notched over 1 billion transactions in one year. Downdetector listed thousands of reports for the issues as people started to get up around 5AM ET and couldn’t get online.

Rogers first addressed the outage in a tweet from its official support account just before 9AM ET, and then went silent for a couple of hours. In a statement given to The Verge and tweeted at around 11:30AM ET, Rogers said, “We are currently experiencing an outage across our wireline and wireless networks and our technical teams are working hard to restore services as quickly as possible. On behalf of all of us at Rogers, we sincerely apologize to our customers, and we will continue to keep you updated as we have more information to share, including when we expect service to be back up. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.”

Cloudflare Radar shows communication between its load-sharing network and Rogers in Canada exhibiting its normal nightly pattern before dropping to essentially zero at around 3 – 4AM ET and registering a flat line ever since. At that same time, there was a massive spike in BGP announcements for the network that indicate changes in routing, but it’s unknown if those were a trigger for the incident or happened as a result of the network going offline.

Internet network disruption tracker NetBlocks shared real-time data showing Canada’s national connectivity has dropped to just 75 percent of its normal levels.

A report by CBC News noted Rogers subsidiary Fido is having problems, too. The article says problems have affected card payment processing and ATMs across Canada. A CBC radio station in Kitchener, Ontario, is also offline, and some telephone services for Ottawa’s transit agency have been knocked out. Pictures from Toronto show people crammed into coffee shops or heading to the library to access Wi-Fi now that their other options are offline.

TekSavvy customer service has told customers the outage extends to “Ontario, Quebec and the Eastern Provinces,” with no ETA for resolution, while the CBC reports that Thunder Bay operator Tbaytel says the Rogers outage is nationwide.

Toronto police tweeted early in the morning after some people in the city experienced connection issues calling 911. “The Rogers Network is experiencing some technical difficulties,” said the Toronto Police Operations Twitter account. “We are working to resolve these issues.” In a follow-up tweet, the police confirmed their 911 center is operational and advised anyone who has to call to stay on the line if they connect and to retry calls if they don’t.

Update July 8th, 9:52AM ET: Added Bank of Montreal information.

Update July 8th, 11:20AM ET: Noted ongoing outage, added information from Cloudflare Radar, TekSavvy, and Tbaytel.

Update July 8th, 11:33AM ET: Added statement from Rogers.

Update July 8th, 12:40PM ET: Added latest update from NetBlocks.

Update July 8th, 1:31PM ET: Added additional information about Interac banking network outage, thanks mbarriault.