Technical outages in Canada last week reveal system fragility

System outages have impacted two big Canadian companies in the last week – Rogers and WestJet — the question is: How fragile are the systems we rely heavily on?

The outages left Canadians without service, and caused frustrations related to delayed flights.

Canadians are reacting, explaining how scary and detrimental the system outage was for their daily lives.

“I drive a truck quite often, and I rely on GPS, and for that few days in particular, I was kind of shut down,” said one Canadian.

Some people are saying the system outages showed vulnerability in the system and that things can easily get out of control.

“It’s kind of shows how we can all be a bit unstable, but we recover from it pretty fast, and it had no long-term impact. So, it kind of also shows that we were prepared for that to some degree,” said another Canadian.

When the internet goes down, more than our social media or binge show viewing can be affected.

Gregory Taylor, associate professor at the University of Calgary, says a break in the telecommunication system is going to happen again.

“It’s about building some redundancy into the system, and by that we mean a secondary route for our data traffic to flow, and we really don’t have a lot of that in Canada,” said Taylor.

Taylor explains that in Canada, 21st century technologies are firmly routed in the previous century.

“When you take a look at what happened with WestJet in the last week or so, that service outage happened because of a train derailment outside of Calgary, and what that shows is that telecommunications which also brought in the internet was built along the train lines, and this is 100 years ago,” he said.

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Taylor adds secondary systems need to be built in Canada’s internet infrastructure.

“When its running along railway lines and other things, we need to build this national network and we need a backup. So yeah, it’s physical fiber in the ground, and these things will be necessary,” Taylor said.