Rogers CEO says service back online for most customers, blames outage on 'network system failure'

Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said 'pretty close to 100 per cent' of the company's network is back online following widespread outages on Friday, which he attributed to a network failure after a maintenance update.

Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said "pretty close to 100 per cent" of the company's network is back online following widespread outages on Friday, which he attributed to a network failure after a maintenance update.

"One hundred per cent of our wireless customers have service across the nation. And in terms of our cable, both home and business, less than one per cent are still having what we would describe as intermittent issues," Staffieri said in an interview with CTV New Channel on. "But our teams are on it and we hope to resolve that within the hour."

The company said on Friday evening services were "starting to recover." In a statement late Friday night, Staffieri said the company had made "meaningful progress towards bringing our networks back online" and apologized for the service disruption.

Staffieri told CTV News Channel the cause of Friday's outage was a "network system failure" following a maintenance update done between late Thursday night and early Friday morning.

The network outage affected several mobile and internet services, banks, debit purchases, passport offices and Canada's ArriveCAN app.

"These are typically, very routine updates in our core network. That update caused some of the routers in our system to malfunction and that malfunction caused traffic overload. And as a result of that, the whole system just shuts down and the network became inoperable to our customers," he said.

After the problem was identified, Staffieri said technicians replaced the troublesome software, equipment and network configuration.