This was further confirmed via this Reddit thread. The core issue appears to be DNS which seems to be an ongoing issue for Rogers as they have had issues with their DNS servers in the last few months leading to a similar outage. Users on Reddit say that changing your DNS from the Rogers one to say Cloudflare or Google can get you back online. Thus if you want a quick workaround, that would be it.
From what I can tell, Rogers has yet to admit that there is a problem. But plenty of their customers have noticed it:
And the timing of this outage could not have been worse for Rogers as they are set to increase prices. Perhaps they should focus on increasing reliability first? Just a thought.
More info as it comes.
UPDATE: According to this Reddit thread service is starting to come back online. But I suspect that a non-trivial amount of users will be dialing up Bell to move their services over to them in the morning because based on the rage that I am seeing on both Twitter and Reddit, Rogers really has managed to anger a whole lot of people with this outage.
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on December 14, 2023 by itnerd
Rogers and Lynk Global, Inc. today announced they completed Canada’s first successful satellite-to-mobile phone call using Samsung S22 smartphones. The call took place in historic Heart’s Content, where the world’s first transatlantic telegraph cable took place between Canada and Ireland over 150 years ago. The two companies also tested SMS, data and emergency alerting services.
Technology available on existing smartphones The phone call was made between Andrew Furey, Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, and a member of the Newfoundland and Labrador Search and Rescue Association using Lynk’s low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites and Rogers national wireless spectrum. Wireless spectrum ensures this technology works on existing smartphones so customers don’t need to install customized apps or not yet available hardware.
Rogers to launch satellite-to-mobile phone technology in 2024 Rogers will launch satellite-to-mobile phone technology in 2024, starting with SMS texting, mass notifications and machine-to-machine AI applications, and then expand the service to include voice and data services quickly thereafter. This new technology will deliver wireless services to the country’s most remote wilderness, national parks and rural highways.
Rogers is committed to improving public safety through its national network investments. This includes the company’s commitment to bring 5G wireless service and 911 access throughout the entire Toronto subway system for all TTC riders and extend wireless coverage along Canada’s remote highways. The company also continues to invest to bring Canadians the largest and most reliable 5G network, which now covers more than 2,200 communities.
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on November 28, 2023 by itnerd
A reader tipped me off to the fact that Rogers appears to be on the verge of increasing their upload speeds in parts of Ontario. The reader in question pointed me to this document on CRTC website (Warning: ZIP File) which has a Microsoft Word file that contains this text:
On November 1, 2023, Rogers Communications Canada Inc. (“Rogers”) is announcing new available upload speeds for customers in certain areas of Ontario. Pursuant to paragraph 209 of Telecom Decision 2006-77, Rogers hereby files TN 81 updating the available services:
50Mbps Upload (U) / 50Mbps Download (D)
150Mbps Upload (U) / 150Mbps Download (D)
150Mbps Upload (U) / 500 Mbps Download (D)
150Mbps Upload (U) / 1,500 Mbps Download (D)
These speeds are only available in certain areas of the network where Rogers has invested in the capability to provide these upload speeds. Services with higher upload speed will be available in areas where network augmentation has occurred and will replace the corresponding lower upload speed service. As there is no change to the download speed available Rogers is not proposing a change to the tariff rates for these services.
Now I did have a look at Rogers press release website and didn’t see an announcement regarding this. I also had a look at their Twitter account and didn’t see anything there either. So I have to wonder if Rogers hit some sort of snag when it comes to rolling these new upload speeds out, or they simply chose not to announce it. Either way, it’s clear that Rogers is up to something. Though, the cynic in me is also thinking that these speeds still don’t match what Bell has to offer. And that still leaves Rogers at a competitive disadvantage relative to Bell. Still, I suppose any speed increase is a good one. Whenever it arrives.
A reader of this blog highlighted to me this story from The Register where it details the fact that Optus in Australia had a massive outage that took out service for millions:
Australia’s second-largest telco, Singapore-owned Optus, experienced an outage beginning Wednesday around 4am Sydney and Melbourne time that left millions nationwide without phone or internet access – either mobile or terrestrial.
The outage also affected transport as Melbourne trains were temporarily inoperable and network users had no internet with which to call ride-shares or taxis.
Even many who could get a ride found themselves without the ability to pay as EFTPOS terminals were also down – and well, who carries cash anymore?
That is massive, widespread, and not trivial. It sounds exactly like what the massive Rogers outage did to Canada back in July of 2022. Speaking of Rogers, the same reader highlighted the fact that there is a connection between the Optus outage and the Rogers outage. Optus is owned by Singtel and Singtel has a name that might be familiar to Canadians:
“The Singtel Group will appoint Jorge Fernandes as its Group Chief Technology Officer with effect from 1 June 2023. A seasoned telecoms executive, Fernandes spent the bulk of his career as CTO in Vodafone, where he led technology strategy and delivery execution across Vodafone UK, Turkey and Portugal. He was most recently CTIO with Rogers Communications in Canada.”
Fernandes was the CTO at Rogers in July of 2022 when their network took a dirt nap affecting millions of Canadians in the process. Two weeks after that outage he was gone as clearly Rogers decided to blame him for the outage. It’s interesting that he has gone someplace else and outage of similar scale and effect happens at his new workplace. Perhaps Rogers made the right call by tying the can to him after the July 2022 outage?
This might be worth watching to see if his current employers do the same thing that Rogers did after their outage.
My wife and I haven’t been customers of Rogers for well over a year now. Thus when this email hit my inbox, I knew immediately that it was a scam:
Now besides the fact that my wife and I aren’t customers of Rogers, here’s the other reason why it’s a scam:
This email was not sent from a Rogers.com or an rci.rogers.com email address. Which means it was not sent by Rogers.
But the question is, what is the threat actor up to? To find out, I clicked on the Review Refund button which you should never do and got this:
This is a very, very bad copy of the login screen for “my Rogers” which is Rogers account management website. Here’s the real one:
Besides the look and feel of the website, there’s the fact that the fake one is clearly not being hosted by Rogers:
This is highlighted by the fact that you don’t see Rogers.com anywhere in the web address. Contrast that with the real one:
The real one has “account.rogers.com” in it.
My initial thought was that this looks like your classic credential harvesting scam to me. By that I mean that this scam wants to grab your credentials so that the threat actors can log into your account and do who knows what. Perhaps order an iPhone or two like I’ve seen in this scam involving Rogers. But I would be wrong. Entering a fake email address and password took me to this page:
It looks like they’re trying to steal your credit card details and using the “refund” that you’re supposed to get as a pretext for that. Not exactly new and it likely won’t fool most people. But as I’ve always said, scams don’t have to be successful in volume to be successful. I’ll be alerting Rogers about this so that they are aware. And the fact that you’ve read this means that you’re aware also. Which means that the level of success that this scam could have has decreased.
Here’s a plot twist that I wasn’t expecting in regards to the Rogers email fiasco. But to explain this plot twist, here’s some background in case you need to get up to speed:
I first reported on issues with Rogers email, and the inability to generate app specific passwords to allow users of Rogers email to use email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird on March 7th.
This issue dragged on for months. There is a workaround involving using webmail, but that workaround is sub optimal to say the least. And as this issue dragged on into April, I was left with no other option than to recommend to my many clients who are affected by this to dump Rogers as their email provider.
Rogers has sort of admitted that there is an issue. But it took them a very long time to do that.
It then seemed that Rogers or more accurately Yahoo was rolling out OAuth to replace the need to generate app specific passwords. But the catch was that not all email clients support OAuth. To date, only the Outlook 365 email client supports this (if you have that client, this will help you to set up your Rogers email account). Which means that Rogers users using many other email clients, or those who weren’t willing to pay Microsoft monthly for Office 365 were still stuck.
So, with all of that in mind, let me get to the plot twist. In the latter half of this past week, I was trying to help yet another person who reached out to me about these ongoing email issues. In this case it was an 87 year old woman who was having great difficulty since March trying to deal with using webmail rather than Microsoft Outlook. Which reinforces the fact that webmail despite what Rogers would tell you is a sub-optimal way to deal with your email. I did tell her up front that it was likely that I could do nothing for her and I did explain that her only real option was to move to Office 365 as that works. But her response was that she is on a fixed income and paying Microsoft monthly for software that she already paid for was a non starter. Which is a valid point. Ultimately she asked me to help her to call into Rogers Tech Support to see if they could do something. Which reluctantly I did. And that’s when I got a bit of a shock. I was told straight out by the support agent that I spoke to that Rogers email issues were Microsoft’s fault because they wouldn’t support OAuth in anything other than the Outlook 365 email client.
Mind blown.
I gently pushed things to understand the logic of that statement, and the support agent explained to me that there’s a fix in Outlook 365 that they refuse to bring that fix to other versions of Outlook, and if they did that, this wouldn’t be an issue.
I’ll dissect that response in a bit. But after having that interaction with Rogers Tech Support, I thought it was an isolated incident. That was until I came across this post on the Rogers community forums yesterday:
I am guessing that the Rogers Tech Support agent that this person got wasn’t as articulate as the one that I got. But seeing as two different people got a tech support agent from Rogers that blamed Microsoft for their email issues suggests to me that blaming Microsoft for Rogers email issues is now the party line at Rogers. That reflects really poorly on Rogers if that is true. And as usual, Rogers is free to reach out to me to put forward their side of the story which I will post as soon as I get it.
In any case, here’s why I think that this response is completely unacceptable. Let’s start with this assertion by Rogers that Microsoft needs to fix this. It is true that Microsoft’s Outlook 365 client supports OAuth which makes it one of the few, if the only third party email client that can be with Rogers email service. While it would be really nice if they brought that OAuth support to other Outlook clients, it isn’t going to happen. The fact is that Microsoft has two types of Office software that you can purchase from them:
Perpetual licensing: This is where you buy the software once and you license it forever. The catch is that Microsoft will provide only bug fixes and security updates. They will not supply new features.
Office 365: This is where you effectively lease the software by paying monthly. While the downside is that you are constantly paying for the software (which to be fair does have financial advantages if you’re a business), Microsoft will bring new features to you. OAuth support is an example of that.
So based on that, it’s pretty clear that Microsoft “fixing” this isn’t going to happen if you have the perpetual licensing version of Outlook. Though once again, it would be nice if they did. Having said that, Rogers throwing Microsoft under the bus is not a good response from Rogers. The reason being is that we are talking about an email service that has Rogers name on it along with Yahoo’s name. And more importantly, Rogers customers are paying Rogers and by extension Yahoo for the email. Microsoft has no involvement in their email service as they don’t provide it, nor are Rogers customers paying them for it. So blaming Microsoft really seems like an act of desperation from Rogers who clearly has no answer for why their email service isn’t working for a significant amount of their customer base. Sort of dovetailing into what I wrote a few days ago. On top of that, if or when Microsoft finds out that Rogers is throwing them under the bus, then I would not want to be Rogers as that conversation will likely be a one way conversation. As in Microsoft will absolutely light up Rogers like a Christmas tree in a bonfire. In my opinion, Rogers and Yahoo would be better served to focus on making their email service work so that this issue goes away rather than blaming Microsoft for their inability to fix this. But given the fact that this issue has been ongoing for months now, I’m not holding my breath on that front. Thus you may want to consider reading this article and take action to abandon Rogers email as clearly this isn’t going to get resolved anytime soon, if at all.
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on September 26, 2023 by itnerd
If you live in any of these areas in Toronto:
Thorncliffe
Upper Beaches
Don Mills
Then you’re into day 2 of a Rogers outage. That means that all of these Rogers services are not working for you:
TV
Internet
Home Phone
Rogers Ignite Internet
Rogers Ignite TV
According to this document, someone other than Rogers cut a cable that took out all the services for all of the people in the above areas. Which sucks for those people. But to Roger’s credit, they are offering a three day credit to those affected. But that isn’t stopping people from blaming Rogers based on browsing the Internet and social media.
News flash: Even though Rogers isn’t known for its stability since the epic outage, this isn’t their fault. So they deserve a free pass this time around. Key words: This time around.
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on September 13, 2023 by itnerd
In the last couple of days, the Federal Government has forced Rogers to open up its network on the Toronto Transit Commission subway to other carriers such as TELUS and Bell. Thus ending in my view, a lot of stonewalling by Rogers who were pretty clearly using the fact that they had this network as a competitive advantage. More on that in a bit. Right now, here’s the salient details of what is being forced upon Rogers:
Rogers Communications must allow access to its network serving the TTC by October 3 at the latest to other carriers.
All wireless carriers who offer service in Toronto will be required to have commercial agreements in place to provide service on the TTC network within the next 100 days.
Every single TTC subway station will have mobile coverage by next June.
About 80% of tunnels will have service by the end of 2025.
The entire system will have full coverage by the end of 2026.
Now up until this announcement was made, the only people who had access to Rogers network were Rogers customers along with Freedom Mobile customers and Videotron customers. And only in a handful of places:
The downtown U-shaped stretch of the Line 1 Yonge-University-Spadina,
13 stations on the Line 2 Bloor-Danforth from Keele to Castle Frank
Tunnels between St. George and Yonge stations.
The actions by the Federal Government, which I applaud by the way, accelerates the expansion of this network and makes sure that the citizens of Toronto can get cell phone access when they take the subway. Especially since the subway isn’t a safe place given the fact that there have been what seems to be a never ending spree of violent incidents on the subway for months now.
And this issue with violence on the subway is part of why I see Rogers as the bad guy here. Rogers bought the bones of this 5G network from BAI Communications, who could never get anyone other than Freedom Mobile to jump on board this network, and clearly wanted to use this as a means to get people to switch to Rogers, as well as force carriers like TELUS and Bell to come on bended knee to Rogers and agree to whatever terms Rogers wanted to serve up to get access to this network. My problem with this is that as mentioned earlier violence is a serious problem on the subway. You would think that Rogers would at least partially put aside their business aspirations to work with other carriers to provide service on the subway so that people feel safer. But based on the fact that it took the Federal Government to lower the boom on Rogers, I guess not.
And the other thing that I would like to point out I am not the only person who thinks Rogers is the bad guy here. Not one person who I’ve talked to over the last couple of months has defended Rogers on this issue and they see Rogers as the bad guy. If you’re Tony Staffieri the CEO of Rogers, that must concern you as that’s not going to help you to acquire new customers or keep the ones you have. I’m not saying that Rogers needed to do this for free. They run a business after all and they have to get compensated for this somehow. But I find it highly implausible that Rogers couldn’t come to an agreement with TELUS, Bell, and other carriers if they really wanted to in order to make this happen.
Rogers during this whole episode hasn’t done itself any favours here. Thus they may want to keep that in mind going forward as I don’t know how many more times Rogers can do things to upset the public and get away with it.
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on August 23, 2023 by itnerd
I wanted to provide an update on this post in which I said that there was hope in terms of a remedy to Rogers long standing email issues that have been ongoing since March of this year. And I will say up front, some of you may not like this update.
The people who will like this update are the ones that are running Office 365. According to this document on the Microsoft website, the version of Microsoft Office 365 that supports Yahoo’s implementation of OAuth has fully rolled out. And I can confirm that if you have Office 365 and you have fully updated to the latest version, you can again add a Rogers email account to Outlook. If you need steps to do that, here’s what I have been doing for my many clients who have been affected by this issue:
1. Update Microsoft Office (save your work before doing this):
Go to File – Click on Office account on the left side:
Click on Update Options and choose Update Now:
Follow the on screen instructions.
2. Go to File- Click on Add Account:
A box should pop up where you can enter your Rogers email address. Once you do that another box should appear:
Enter the password that you use for Rogers webmail. Then follow the prompts that appear after that.
This method has worked for every single one of my clients who is running Office 365. At this point you’re likely wondering why I keep saying “Office 365” when I talk about this method. I am saying this because this support for Yahoo’s implementation of OAuth appears to not exist in what Microsoft terms as “Consumer SKUs such as Office Personal and Office Home.” Meaning that if you decided to pay once for Microsoft Office rather than use Office 365 and pay monthly or yearly for it, you’re still out of luck and you’re still forced to get your email via webmail. I have confirmed that this doesn’t work with clients who have these versions of Microsoft Office. The only workaround for this appears to be to switch to Office 365. That’s an option that I simply can’t recommend to anyone who’s already paid for Microsoft Office.
Now it would be easy to light Microsoft up like a Christmas tree in a bonfire over this lack of support for non Office 365 users. And yeah, they likely should be bringing this support for OAuth to other versions of Microsoft Office. But Microsoft wouldn’t be in this situation if Rogers and Yahoo didn’t have an incident that has been ongoing since March of this year that made this an issue for Microsoft. So what I would say to both Rogers and Yahoo is that they need to both take some leadership on this and do whatever they need to do get Microsoft to roll this out so that ALL Microsoft Office users can put this issue to bed. Either that, or both Rogers and Yahoo need to fix the app specific password issue (or stop using app specific passwords altogether) so that Rogers users can use the email client of their choice with Rogers email. Because despite what Rogers tech support says, webmail is not an acceptable replacement for something like Outlook.
Of course instead of waiting for Rogers and Yahoo to fix this, you can take the option that I’ve been recommending for a while now. Which is to abandon Rogers email offering and use something else. The majority of my reasons can be found in this article. Rogers and Yahoo aren’t communicating to users about this issue. Nor do they have a resolution to this issue that works for their entire user base. Thus You cannot depend on both companies to save you from this if you’re affected by this. Which tells you all you need to know about both companies.
I will continue to monitor this and provide further updates as they come. Because if Rogers and Yahoo isn’t going to keep you updated, someone has to. And that appears to be yours truly. Which also tells you all you need to know about both companies.
The person told me that the threat actor offered him a $40 a month plan with a “free” iPhone 14 Pro Max. Now if that sounds familiar, it’s a very similar pitch that I got from the threat actor who claimed to be Rogers. Now he asked for the details via email to make sure he got it in writing. And he did get them. But he got them from an email address ending in “mail.com.” This tipped him off that this was a scam and he hung up. But not before providing his drivers licence number and home address. Which is bad as that is a great jumping off point for a threat actor to launch an identity theft scam. On my advice, he’s enabling credit monitoring via Trans Union and Equifax to make sure that he catches anything that these threat actors do. And it’s a safe bet that he’s likely to be the target of more scams in the future as he’s now on the radar screens of the threat actor.
Now, to make sure that you stay safe, here’s some advice in terms of protecting yourself:
Remember that Canadian cell phone plans are among the most expensive in the world. And carriers don’t give away phones. Especially iPhone 14 Pro Max models. Thus if it sound too good to be true. It is likely too good to be true.
If you want to verify if a deal is true or a scam, hang up and call TELUS using a number from their website. Do not rely on the number that you see on your phone’s call display as that could be a number that has been spoofed.
Under no circumstances should you give out any personal information to anyone who calls you in this manner.
What’s clear here is that the threat actors have either moved on from using the Rogers name to run their scam, or the threat actors are running the two scams in parallel. Which means that they could move to using Bell, or Freedom, or any other carrier at any time once the word gets out that the scam exists and is tied to a specific carrier. That means you need to keep your head on a swivel at all times to make sure that you don’t get taken advantage of these scams.
Finally, if you’ve come across one of these scams, please reach out to me so that I can publish the details and expose these scams so it limits how effective they are. Also reach out to the phone carrier in question so that they can take actions on their end. Because whomever this threat actor is, they’re clearly busy trying to scam Canadians out of their hard earned money.
BREAKING: Rogers And Fido Internet Is Down For Many Canadians [UPDATE: It’s Coming Back Online]
Posted in Commentary with tags Rogers on January 4, 2024 by itnerdAs I type this it appears that Rogers along with their Fido brand is down for many Canadians. This is confirmed by DownDetector here:
And here:
This was further confirmed via this Reddit thread. The core issue appears to be DNS which seems to be an ongoing issue for Rogers as they have had issues with their DNS servers in the last few months leading to a similar outage. Users on Reddit say that changing your DNS from the Rogers one to say Cloudflare or Google can get you back online. Thus if you want a quick workaround, that would be it.
From what I can tell, Rogers has yet to admit that there is a problem. But plenty of their customers have noticed it:
And the timing of this outage could not have been worse for Rogers as they are set to increase prices. Perhaps they should focus on increasing reliability first? Just a thought.
More info as it comes.
UPDATE: According to this Reddit thread service is starting to come back online. But I suspect that a non-trivial amount of users will be dialing up Bell to move their services over to them in the morning because based on the rage that I am seeing on both Twitter and Reddit, Rogers really has managed to anger a whole lot of people with this outage.
Leave a comment »