network outage
Rogers Telecommunications restores service after 19 hour outage disrupting life in Canada
Rogers Communications Inc. said its network was beginning to recover late on Friday after a 19-hour service outage at one of Canada’s biggest telecom operators shut banking, transport and government access for millions, drawing outrage from customers and adding to criticism over its industry dominance.
The outage shut down internet access, cell phone and landline phone connections. Some callers could not reach emergency services via 911 calls, police across Canada said. The disruption also prompted a health-care network in Toronto to ask physicians who were on call Friday to “physically come into the hospital for the shift.”
The total communications blackout was Rogers’ second in 15 months. It began around 4:30 a.m. ET (0830 GMT) and knocked out a quarter of Canada’s observable internet connectivity, said the NetBlocks monitoring group.
Canadians crowded into cafes and public libraries that still had internet access and hovered outside hotels to catch a signal. Canada’s border services agency said the outage affected its mobile app for incoming travelers. Retailers’ cashless pay systems went down; banks reported issues with ATM services.
Rogers (RCIb.TO) said in a statement on Twitter that “our wireless services are starting to recover” and workers are trying to get people back online as quickly as possible.
In a separate statement on its website, Rogers President and Chief Executive Officer Tony Staffieri apologized for the outage, saying: “Today we let you down. We can and will do better.”
We know you count on Rogers to connect you to emergency services, make payments, serve your customers, connect with work and keep in touch with friends and family. We take that responsibility very seriously and today we let you down. We can and will do better.
As you know, we experienced a network outage across both wireless and wireline service that began early this morning.
We have made meaningful progress towards bringing our networks back online and many of our wireless customers are starting to see services return. We don’t yet have an ETA on when our networks will be fully restored but we will continue to share information with our customers as we restore full service.
We know going a full day without connectivity has real impacts on our customers, and all Canadians. On behalf of all of us here at Rogers, Rogers for Business, Fido, chatr and cityfone, I want to sincerely apologize for this service interruption and the impact it is having on people from coast to coast to coast.
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Staffieri explained that the company doesn’t have a timeline on when the networks will be fully restored, “but we will continue to share information with our customers as we restore full services.” He said a credit would be applied to affected customers.
A spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said Friday evening that the outage was not the result of a cyber attack.
Cloudflare Inc., a global cloud-services provider, said Friday its analysis indicated the outage was due to an internal error at Rogers as the telecommunications company apparently tried to upgrade certain equipment that helps internet data flow through networks. A similar mistake hit Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp in the fall of last year, triggering an outage that lasted about six hours.
The disruption also made transport and flight bookings more difficult at the height of the summer travel season. Transport Canada has not received reports of direct safety or security impacts to any flights, marine or rail services as part of this outage, according to spokesperson Sau Liu.
With about 10 million wireless subscribers and 2.25 million retail internet subscribers, Rogers is the top provider in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province and home to its biggest city, Toronto. Rogers, BCE Inc (BCE.TO) and Telus Corp (T.TO) control 90% of the market share in Canada.
Canadian Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne in a tweet called the situation “unacceptable” and said he was in communication with telecom CEOs, including those from Rogers, Bell and Telus, to find a solution.
Canadian financial institutions and banks, including Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD.TO) and Bank Of Montreal (BMO.TO), said the outage disrupted services. Royal Bank of Canada (RY.TO) said its ATMs and online banking services were affected.
A spokesperson for Vancouver International airport, among Canada’s busiest, said travelers could not pay for parking, use terminal ATMs or purchase items at airport retailers.
Air Canada (AC.TO), the country’s largest airline, said its call center had been affected. Airlines in Canada, like those in Europe and the United States, have been experiencing high call volume amid flight cancellations and delays due to pandemic staffing shortages.
Critics said the outage demonstrated a need for more competition in telecom for Canada.
Earlier this year, Canada’s competition bureau blocked Rogers’ attempt to take over rival Shaw Communications (SJRb.TO) in a C$20 billion deal, saying it would hamper competition in a country where telecom rates are some of the world’s highest. The merger still awaits a final verdict. read more
“Today’s outage illustrates the need for more independent competition that will drive more network investment so outages are far less likely,” said Anthony Lacavera, managing director of Globealive, an investment firm that had bid for a wireless provider involved in the Rogers/Shaw deal.
On Friday, some government agencies canceled services after losing internet access, including Canada’s passport offices and the telecoms regulator. The Canada Revenue Agency, the country’s tax collection body, lost telephone service.
In downtown Ottawa, Canada’s capital, cafes including Tim Hortons were not accepting debit and credit cards and were turning away customers who did not have cash.
Michelle Wasylyshen, spokeswoman for the Retail Council of Canada, said outages would vary from one retailer to the next: “Cash will most certainly be king at many stores today.”
While the disruptions were widespread, several companies and transport points said their services were unaffected. The Port of Montreal reported no disruptions. The Calgary Airport Authority said it had “no major operational impacts.”
References:
New T-Mobile no longer the “uncarrier”: layoffs, network outage, challenge integrating Sprint network
T-Mobile US Inc. is cutting jobs faster than initially planned after its April merger with rival Sprint Corp. created a company with about 80,000 employees. Before regulators signed off on T-Mobile’s $26 billion merger with Sprint, executives like former CEO John Legere said that the merger would create many new jobs from “day one.” With the ink barely dry on the deal, it’s abundantly clear that is NOT happening.
T-Mobile said in a securities filing late Wednesday that it expects to spend about $300 million more than initially projected on merger-related costs, primarily on severance expenses, to accelerate expected cost benefits from the deal. The company now expects merger costs before taxes to total $800 million to $900 million during the June-ended quarter. The “new T-Mo” didn’t detail the number of jobs being cut. T-Mobile ended 2019 with 53,000 workers. Sprint last reported 28,500 employees in early 2019.
T-Mobile Chief Executive Mike Sievert said Tuesday the company seeks to hire workers in 5,000 new positions like retail and engineering over the next 12 months. “As part of this process, some employees who hold similar positions are being asked to consider a career change inside the company, and others will be supported in their efforts to find a new position outside the company,” Mr. Sievert said.
The savings estimates T-Mobile provided investors suggest several thousand jobs are being eliminated, according to Jonathan Chaplin, a telecom analyst for New Street Research. Those cuts don’t include stores run by third-party dealers, some of which will switch to other brands, he added. “They will be cutting redundant positions, but adding other positions as they invest for growth,” Mr. Chaplin said.
T-Mobile last year told lawmakers that the then-proposed merger of the two wireless giants would yield more jobs at the combined company by 2024 than each business would employ on its own.
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Back Story:
Last month, T-Mobile laid off an estimated 6,000 employees from its Metro prepaid division, layoffs that had everything to do with the merger, and nothing to do with the COVID-19 crisis. And on June 15th, hundreds of Sprint employees were unceremoniously fired as part of a six minute conference call during which nobody was allowed to ask questions:
“In a conference call on Monday lasting under six minutes, T-Mobile vice president James Kirby told hundreds of Sprint employees that their services were no longer needed. He declined to answer his employees’ questions, citing the “personal” nature of employee feedback, and ended the call.”
On June 19th, Tech Dirt’s Karl Bode wrote:
This was all ridiculously predictable. There’s 40 years of documented US telecom history showing that the elimination of a major competitor reduces competition and raises prices (oh hi, Comcast). Global markets (Canada, Ireland) have also made this clear. Such deals almost universally result in thousands of layoffs as redundant retail, support, and management positions are culled. It’s why similar deals of this type (AT&T’s 2011 acquisition of T-Mobile, T-Mobile’s 2014 acquisition of Sprint) were blocked. This isn’t a debate topic. It’s not a murky subject. Telecom consolidation routinely ends badly for employees and customers.
Economists made all of these points to the DOJ and FCC, but they were unceremoniously ignored. First by an FCC that couldn’t bother to even read its own staff analysis before rubber stamping the a merger it helped cook up behind closed doors, then by a DOJ whose “antitrust” boss personally escorted the deal to fruition while ignoring all criticism.
If you go back and look at some of ex-CEO John Legere’s blog posts from a few months ago (which I’m sure won’t be around much longer), the CEO repeatedly promised that the merger would be “job positive” from “day one”:
“So, let me be really clear on this increasingly important topic. This merger is all about creating new, high-quality, high-paying jobs, and the New T-Mobile will be jobs-positive from Day One and every day thereafter. That’s not just a promise. That’s not just a commitment. It’s a fact. To achieve what we’re setting out to do – become the supercharged Un-carrier that delivers new value, ignites competition and delivers nationwide real 5G for All – the New T-Mobile will provide an amazing and compelling set of services for consumers.”
Legere was so breathlessly offended by statements to the contrary, he tried to insist that union officials were lying — before reminding everybody he testified under oath about the deal’s looming job explosion:
“We also keep seeing the opposition try to use projected layoff numbers from an analyst’s projections that were based on a completely different deal at a completely different point in time to discredit this merger. It’s SO bad that the head of the Communications Workers Association (CWA) was bold enough to refer to those completely unrelated numbers in a CONGRESSIONAL HEARING. I guess if the real numbers don’t tell the story you want, you can just make up new ones? It’s actually offensive. At the hearings, I raised my right hand and swore under oath to tell the TRUTH… and the truth is that the New T-Mobile will CREATE JOBS.”
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Network Outage:
T-Mobile network suffered a nationwide service failure on Monday. Federal regulators said they would investigate the incident, which led to intermittent voice and data coverage for about 12 hours. Company chief technology officer Neville Ray later said the problems stemmed from a supplier’s fiber optic circuit going down. But what happened to automated failure detection and recovery/restoral?
Cellphone carriers’ network backbones usually have several fallback routes should one path get severed. Mr. Ray said that “redundancy failed us and resulted in an overload situation that was then compounded by other factors.” The company said its Sprint customers weren’t affected and vowed to put new safeguards in place.
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Integrating Sprint’s 3G and 5G networks:
The “new T-Mo” also faces the challenge of integrating Sprint’s 3G CDMA network with its own 3G GSM network. Also the two former carriers were designing different 5G NSA networks, albeit both using 3GPP Release 15 “5G NR” for the data plane.
T-Mobile has had difficulty integrating Sprint’s customers and network assets and building out a faster 5G network throughout the country, The Wall Street Journal reported in May.
Despite pandemic-related challenges, T-Mobile has begun the process of integrating Sprint into the new stand-alone company and tapping into the trove of airwaves it acquired as part of the deal. Many of T-Mobile’s current executives remain in charge, though some Sprint leaders including technology chief John Saw hold key posts in the combined company.
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Separately, AT&T has outlined plans to cut more than 3,400 jobs in the coming weeks, according to the Communications Workers of America, which represents a large share of the telecom and media giant’s 244,000 employees. Those cuts exclude hundreds of other positions potentially eliminated through store closures.
AT&T said it will make “targeted, but sizable reductions in our workforce across executives, managers and union-represented employees” as it overhauls its employee base. The carrier also is closing more stores to cater to online shoppers, a shift the company said it accelerated in response to the coronavirus crisis.
“Reducing our workforce is a difficult decision that we don’t take lightly,” AT&T said in a statement.
In light of the tens of thousands of AT&T layoffs the last few years, does anyone seriously believe that statement?
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References:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-and-at-t-are-cutting-thousands-of-jobs-11592501203
https://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-to-feel-coronavirus-pain-through-2020-11588799462