'I'm frustrated': Some Rogers customers in Ottawa without service for second day

The cross-country telecom chaos hasn’t ended for everyone, but the majority of Rogers’ millions of customers are relieved to be reconnected to the world Saturday.

Despite the telecom giant saying “the vast majority” of their customers have had their service restored, many are still left without full connection.

“Yeah, I’m frustrated,” said Kanata resident John Hansen.

His cellular service was restored late Friday, but as of early Saturday, Hansen was still without internet access.

"I'm glad I had an over-the-air antenna for the TV so I could at least watch TV that way. It makes you think about what you're gonna do as a backup for the internet, kind of like when your power fails."

As of Saturday morning, Rogers said service had been restored for “the vast majority” of its clients, and the company provided the following explanation for what happened.

“We’ve narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update that we did late Thursday evening, early Friday morning,” said Rogers President and CEO Tony Staffieri.

“These are typically very routine updates in our core network. That update caused some of the routers in our system to malfunction, and that malfunction caused traffic overload and, as a result of that, the whole system just shuts down.”

While service was returned for many to start the weekend, it didn’t come without challenges.

“Yesterday was a nightmare for sure,” said Ottawa resident Sally Thomas, who was without service Friday.

She said that for people with disabilities like herself, the impact was substantial. She could not reach her support worker and struggled to book a ride with Para Transpo.

"Thousands of people with disabilities are adversely affected when they can't reach care givers, can't call 911, can't call Para Transpo, the list is extensive."

Businesses too were left cleaning up the mess. Preston Hardware spent Saturday morning charging purchases made Friday.

"Our credit machines were down, cash registers were working but cash only, and so to make it convenient for our customers, we took down their credit cards and processed it this morning," said Robbie Ibrahim, the store manager.

The outage was an inconvenience to millions, and still is for some, but Rogers promises they won’t be phoning it in, the company plans to invest more money to prevent this from happening ever again.

“So that they can rely and we can earn their trust again on the Rogers network,” said Staffieri.