Rogers is warning of a scam claiming to reimburse customers for last Friday’s widespread service outages.
This warning comes after a day-long internet and telecommunications outage that impacted thousands of Rogers customers across Canada on June 8. The system failure also affected 911 services, ATMs, and phone lines.
Service has now been restored and Rogers’ “networks and systems are close to fully operational”, said a statement issued the following day by Rogers Communications’ president and CEO Tony Staffieri.
“We are aware of scam text messages being sent claiming to offer credits in the wake of yesterday’s service interruptions,” the telecom said Saturday on Twitter.
“We will apply the credit proactively to your account & no action is required. If you receive a suspicious SMS, please forward it to 7726 (SPAM).”
“We know how much our customers rely on our networks and I sincerely apologize. We’re particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority,” Staffieri wrote.
The Friday outage had a significant impact on Canadians. Internet traffic in Canada as a whole was 75% below average on Friday morning, according to internet monitoring watchdog group Netblocks.org.
Along with other services not directly under Rogers’ direct control, such as emergency services, travel, and financial networks, Rogers-owned flanker brands like Fido and Chatr also went offline.
Approximately nine million people use the company’s wireless services, and just under three million use its cable and internet services.
According to Netblocks, a global watchdog organization that monitors cybersecurity and the governance of the Internet, the Rogers outage impacted a quarter of Canada’s “observable connectivity.”
“The crippling incident has raised questions over the centralization of critical infrastructure,” the group said in a tweet. And the question remains…could this have been a cyber attack?
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