‘Very, very alarming’: B.C. technology expert weighs in on Rogers’ outage 

A B.C. freelance technology journalist gave his thoughts on the massive Rogers’ service failure.

Andy Baryer, the former host and producer for GetConnected, Canada’s longest-running technology show, said the Rogers’ service failure highlights many concerns experts have.

“It’s been about 24 hours and we still don’t know what the cause was,” Baryer told Global News on Saturday morning.

“On Friday, I suspected it was a cyber attack, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case (now).”

He continued, “a company called Cloudflare, which manages internet traffic across the world, suspects it’s an internal error.”

Cloudflare posted on its site saying as much.

“Based on what we’re seeing and similar incidents in the past, we believe this is likely to be an internal error, not a cyber attack,” Cloudflare staff wrote in a blog post.

Baryer said a failure as large as this is not only concerning but head-scratching as there are supposed to be protocols in place to prevent such a large failure.

“These networks are designed with redundancies in place to make sure something like this doesn’t happen. The fact that it did happen is very, very alarming,” Baryer said.

“You don’t see this in other countries and this is the second time in 15 months that Rogers network has gone down.”

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Rogers begins restoring service

The technology expert said one of the obvious concerns that has been highlighted with the outage is Canada’s dependency on only three major telecommunication companies.

“It just shows how unfair it is in Canada that we only have three big carrier companies,” Baryer said.

“We already pay high prices for our internet and our cell phone bills and now we have these kinds of service disruptions. It’s bringing back the talk of us bringing in a fourth carrier.”

Compensation for customers has been a large discussion online and Baryer said it’s hard to say how much compensation could be on its way.

“That’s going to be an interesting thing, seeing how much they compensate their users,” Baryer said.

“The compensation for their customers (is up in the air). They still have to compensate the Canadian economy and all the small businesses that suffered on Friday.”

This outage has also led to the thought that Rogers and Shaw merging may be “dead in the water,” according to Baryer.

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A day of frustration for millions of Canadians following a nation-wide network outage at Rogers Communications