Thunder Bay, ON — Telecommunications company Rogers says an attempted copper theft was behind the widespread interruption that left some its Calgary customers without services on Monday morning.
A spokesperson for Rogers says the interruption happened just before 3 a.m., and is part of a “troubling rise” in vandalism and attempted theft it’s been seeing to its network infrastructure across the country. “…causing service interruptions and affecting Canadians who rely on our networks to stay connected. Beyond being a significant inconvenience for our customers, these acts can have a serious impact on public safety,” the spokesperson advised.
“Early this morning, thieves intentionally cut some of our fibre lines in an attempt to steal cooper, causing significant damage and interrupting internet, TV and home phone services for customers in some Calgary neighbourhoods.” Calgary law enforcement say they were notified around 6:20 a.m. that the wires had been cut, but say it happened far earlier in the day in an alley in the 3300 block of Erlton Street Southwest. Rogers says there are six crews in the area all day with over 20 technicians working to repair the “extensive damage” and restore services. Its website showed many of their impacted customers live in parts of Southeast and Southwest Calgary, including Elboya, Manchester Industrial, Burns Industrial, Erlton, Bonnybrook, Mills Estate, Inglewood, Dover, Erin Woods, Eastfield, Golden Triangle, Lynnwood, and Foothills.
Owner Edy Ukbakha noted he considered closing for the day on Monday because of the outage with the internet being so crucial to run his business.
The Edy Hair Planet Barber Shop is located in Manchester Industrial. Owner Edy Ukbakha noted he considered closing for the day on Monday because of the outage with the internet being so crucial to run his business. “(I) couldn’t take payments because the payment system is attached to the internet and after I took payments from two people and then realized that it didn’t go through.” Carmi Levy, a technology analyst, says being connected is how most of us now live, but that many Canadians in some cases are too reliant on the internet and internet-based connectivity and technology. This includes keeping in contact with clients through phone and email, streaming on-screen entertainment, and even running a business. Levy says before outages like Monday’s is when people should be asking themselves, what if we didn’t have email, social media or applications? How would we get our work done during an outage? “I think this particular case is a really good exercise for us to ask ourselves those questions and have those hard conversations because we have become too dependent on the technology,” indicated Levy. “We assume that it’s always going to be there, but we’re in trouble when it isn’t.” Rogers says it will start to restore services to customers later Monday evening and that efforts to restore services will continue overnight, estimated to be resolved by 9 a.m. Tuesday morning. Rogers is looking to the federal government to take actions against “these network tampering acts and welcome the changes in Bill C-14 to crack down on copper theft,” as well as acts of crime and vandalism that targets their infrastructure. Its stats show these vandalism caused outage repairs can take up to three to four times longer “due to the extent of damage and associated repairs,” and has seen the number of hours related to vandalism repairs surge by over 400 per cent since 2022..
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📍 Source: Global News Thunder Bay · By: Global News Staff · 🗓️ August 10, 2026 · 🏠 ThunderBay.Online
