Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri issued a statement on Saturday afternoon saying that the service has returned and that "the company's networks and systems are close to operating at full capacity."

He said the company continues to monitor its network for issues and investigate the root cause of these problems.

He said, "We now believe we have isolated the cause of the network system failure after a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to crash early Friday morning."

Staffieri apologized for the service outage, adding, "We are particularly concerned that some customers could not access emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority."

On the other hand, Richard LeBlanc, Professor of Governance, Law, and Ethics at York University in Toronto, said the outage presents a learning opportunity for threat actors such as Russian state-sponsored hackers.

He said such parties can now see how vulnerable the Canadian industry, financial institutions, and healthcare systems are to an attack on a telecommunications provider.

He said in a phone interview, "This could have been catastrophic for the country if this represented a threat."

 LeBlanc said the outage – the second major Rogers network outage in 15 months – illustrates that the federal government cannot rely solely on telecom companies to do the right thing.

Adding, "I think it’s time for regulators, including Industry Canada and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), to start insisting on sound, strong internal controls subject to independent audit so there won’t be an outage like this in the future."

While Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne described the outage as "unacceptable," LeBlanc said that kind of talk needs to be followed up with action.

Explaining, "I think regulators have the authority and the power, and the question is: do they have the courage to use it?"

On the other hand, CRTC spokesperson Patricia Valladao said the telecom regulator is in contact with Rogers.

She wrote in an email, "Right now, our focus is on the outage and recovery from it."

Adding, "When it’s over, we will take all necessary measures to examine what happened and implement measures to prevent it from happening again."

According to Netblocks, a UK-based organization monitoring cybersecurity, the outage disrupted about 25 percent of internet connectivity visible in Canada at its peak.

Rogers said it would proactively provide compensation to customers due to the outage but did not provide details on the amount.

The company said it is aware of phishing text messages claiming to offer credit and that credit will be automatically added to eligible customers.

 Rogers Communications in Canada announced on Saturday the restoration of mobile phone and internet services to the "vast majority" of customers after an outage lasting more than 15 hours.

The outage, which the Toronto-based telecom company did not explain, began Friday morning, leaving many customers without mobile and internet service and caused issues with emergency services and others.

In a tweet, the company said some customers might experience delays in fully restoring service to normal.

It added, "Our technical teams are working hard to ensure internet is restored to remaining customers as soon as possible. Again, we apologize for the outage that caused this issue for our customers."