Rogers outage in Canada (July 2022)
A nationwide outage of Canadian carrier Rogers' network on July 8, 2022, caused by a configuration change, which cut internet, mobile, emergency calls and Interac payments.
A large telecommunications carrier often runs its fixed and mobile services, and those of the businesses that depend on it, over a single core network, so that an error at the center spreads to the whole country. The risk is not an attack but a routine change: a modification meant to clean up a configuration removes a filter that protected the core, and the routers are flooded with routing information they were never meant to receive. For an insurer, this is a textbook case of business interruption from the failure of a telecommunications supplier, with no physical damage and no malice, striking shops, banks and public services at the same time. The event also led the regulator to require mutual assistance agreements between carriers for emergency calls and fallback roaming.
At 4:30 a.m. Eastern time on July 8, 2022, Rogers' network went down for about fifteen hours, and several days for some customers: 911 calls failed, public alerts were interrupted, and Interac debit and Interac e-Transfer were unavailable nationwide. The independent report commissioned by the CRTC, published in July 2024, attributed the outage to the removal of an access control list filter on distribution routers, which the change management process had failed to flag.
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