The mother of all outages

Muse #533 - fun from the sidelines

Photo by Rohit Rao on Unsplash

One of Canada’s largest service providers had a major outage this morning. And as of this writing this evening, the services are not yet back with no end in sight. A full one-third or more of cellphones and internet services are down. Financial services companies including the one I work for are nearly totally shut down. Banks, ATMs, payment systems, and emergency 911 services are all impacted.

They call it a black swan event. And these things are once-in-a-lifetime events (hopefully) worth watching from the sidelines. Neither of our services - internet or cellphone are with Rogers so our lights are up, so as to say. But I see people struggling. And shows how challenged we are to live our lives without these services. People are scrambling for cash to fill gas or buy food. And shows how fragile our dependency on technology is and that is indeed alarming.

Interestingly sidebar is that Roger’s outage map looks like a rapid census event to count all Canadians and identify where they live. All we have to do is count the outages total and multiply by 3 or 4 and voila we get a ballpark census of Canada done. Such is the impact today. The rest of Canada has hardly anyone except what we see on the map. And most of the Canadians live clustered within 150 km or so north of the US border as the more northern one goes, the more severe the winters are.

Sources:

Massive Rogers outage snarling telecom, banking, and government services continues — https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rogers-outage-cell-mobile-wifi-1.6514373

Rogers offers Canada’s fastest, most reliable outages across the country — https://thebeaverton.com/2022/07/rogers-offers-canadas-fastest-most-reliable-outages-across-the-country/