Major telecoms agree to emergency outage deal: Minister

The federal industry minister says Canada’s major telecom companies have reached a formal agreement to “ensure and guarantee” emergency roaming and other mutual assistance in the case of a major outage.

The deal comes after a massive Rogers Communications Inc. service disruption on July 8 that affected millions of Canadians

The network outage caused customers and businesses across the country to be without internet and mobile services, and also disrupted 9-1-1 and debit transactions.

Rogers says a network system failure, following a maintenance update, was what caused some routers to malfunction and led the outage.

In the days after the outage, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Francois-Philippe Champagne directed the CEOs of Rogers and other telecom companies to develop a backup plan to prevent a similar scenario, giving them 60 days to do so.

He says the companies have committed to assist one another to ensure 911 connections aren’t affected in the event of an outage.

Champagne says the agreement is only a first step in his network resiliency agenda.

He also says he is taking additional steps, including directing the Canadian Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (CSTAC) to come up with further measures within six months to ensure robust and reliable telecom networks across the country.

Rogers is the parent company of this website.