The IT Nerd

Yesterday I brought you a story of a very serious service outage at Rogers. To recap, if you signed up for Internet service with Rogers, or you changed modems in the last few days, you have no service. That’s due to whatever systems that they have to activate cable modems go down, which resulted in a untold number of people being left without Internet service. And there is still no ETA from Canada’s largest telco as to when this will be resolved which is simply stunning.

This was brought to my attention by a client of mine who absolutely relies on the Internet. She’s an 83 year old woman who is effectively shut in her home. Thus she relies on the Internet to do everything from order medication, order groceries, to communicate with her family in the Ukraine and the USA. The first two items are key because she has mobility issues that keep her from leaving her home. Thus she uses the Internet to order medication and food for delivery. She is affected by this outage because she had a Rogers cable modem fail and had to do a cable modem swap to get back online.

Except that she isn’t online thanks to the problems that Rogers has.

Because of her situation, having no access to the Internet isn’t a minor inconvenience. It’s a major disruption to her ability to live. So I knew that if Rogers couldn’t get her back online (because as I related to you yesterday in the story that I linked above, Rogers tech support had no ability to bring her back online), then I had to step in and help her. In her case, she had a computer and an iPad. So while I couldn’t do anything about the computer, I could get the iPad back on line. So I took one of my phones, which was the ZTE Axon that I kept around for testing purposes, and put it into mobile hotspot mode. I then connected her iPad to it. That allowed her to do everything that she needed to do from her iPad. Mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, the issues that Rogers has continues to affect who knows how many people. Many of whom took to Twitter to vent:

This whole episode shows that Rogers has serious issues that has to make their customers wonder about their choice of Internet provider. And the last Tweet that I posted above highlights why. It seems inconceivable that Canada’s largest telco doesn’t have a backup of some sort for a system that for them has to be business critical. You have to wonder if that sort of short sighted thinking exists elsewhere within Rogers. I don’t know and maybe I am looking at this wrong. But here’s what I do know. A lot of people are really, really mad at Rogers right now. And the longer that this goes on, the more likely that Bell Canada and other telcos are going to get phone calls from people who simply want to get back online. Thus, I truly hope that Rogers is putting every resource that they have to resolve this issue. Then they come out with a robust apology to their customers for the trouble that they’ve caused, paired with something to make things right for all their customers. Given how much of a mess this is for Rogers customers, it’s the least that they can do.

UPDATE: My client called me to say that she just got an automated call from Rogers to say that the ticket that she opened related to this outage was not resolved and that they had no ETA when it would be. She’s asked me to come over to her house on Monday to look at other options as she thinks that Rogers inability to get their Internet offering working is ridiculous.

UPDATE #2: It seems Rogers problems are bigger than just their Internet offerings as per this Tweet from Rogers:

So this issue also affects home phone and cable TV customers too. That makes this issue an #EpicFail as that’s most of their business portfolio with the only exception being their cell phone operation. What’s an even bigger #EpicFail is that Rogers is still doing installs and upgrades despite knowing that they have a problem of this scale. I really can’t see how that makes sense as it creates a really bad impression of Rogers as per the the Tweets above. Not to mention that they are simply making the problem worse as they are adding to the queue of hardware waiting to be activated. Rogers clearly didn’t think that through.

UPDATE #3: Readers of this blog have tipped me off that Bell Canada is aggressively going after frustrated Rogers customers on Twitter to steal them from Rogers. Take this for example:

Rogers problems have just gotten worse. I would not want to be them right about now.

From the “you’ve got to be kidding me” department comes the this from Rogers. It seems that since yesterday, customers who sign up for their Internet offering or need to swap modems for whatever reason, cannot get service. The core issue revolves around the fact that whatever infrastructure that they have that activates their cable modems the first time they appear on their network is not working. Thus it is keeping new and existing customers who have had them modems swapped offline. Now to be clear, if you don’t fit either one of these use cases, this is a non-issue for you. But if you do fit one of these use cases, you’re likely not a happy camper as evidenced by this:

Now I became aware of this because of a client who called me in desperation as Rogers couldn’t get her modem online due to the fact that she had to swap a failed modem for a new one. When I spoke to their tech support last evening, they had no ETA for resolution. Nor can tech support do anything to assist customers. Seeing as this outage is going into the second day, it must be costing them lots of money, the goodwill of their customers,  as well as tying up their phone lines with angry customers calling in to complain. As I type this, the client who called me is still without service, and is considering moving to Bell if for no other reason than to spite Rogers. Hopefully for their sake, this issue gets resolved today and that does not happen. But given the Rogers / Apple Watch Series 3 debacle, another customer’s issues with Rogers, and my own personal issues with Rogers, it really seems that all is not well with Canada’s largest telco at the moment.

UPDATE: A reader pointed me towards Canadian Outages which has complaints piling up. And judging from what I am reading, Rogers isn’t making many friends when it comes to their ability to provide their customers with Internet service.

UPDATE #2: I have a follow up to this story here.