Rogers outage: CRTC head says 911 issue was "complete connectivity" loss

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Ian Scott, chairperson and CEO of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), spoke Monday before the House of Commons standing committee on industry and technology about the recent outage of Rogers Communications Inc. that impacted millions this month.

Questioned about the impact to 911 services, Scott said the 911 network was fully functional, but the issue that arose was Rogers suffered from a loss of "complete connectivity" and so "it was unable to pass on 911 calls." He also said that the organization has various penalties it can apply in certain situations, but it was still to be determined whether or not Rogers would face any as a result of their outage earlier this month.

He said they had an administrative monetary policy, but said it is used to encourage compliance not for punitive reasons. He stressed that the company said it would do better and the CRTC would "make sure" it does.

He also spoke about a response by Rogers about what it would do to prevent the issues that occurred from happening again, saying CRTC would "act quickly" in responding.