The Weeknd sets Sept. 22 for Toronto show postponed by Rogers network outage

TORONTO – The Weeknd is laying down plans for his return to Toronto’s Rogers Centre.

After a countrywide outage of the Rogers wireless network forced him to postpone his stadium concert earlier this month, the Canadian pop singer has marked Sept. 22 as the night he’ll make up for the show.

Promoter Live Nation says tickets for the original July 8 date will be honoured for the rescheduled performance.

Originally, the “Blinding Lights” singer hoped to kick off the After Hours Til Dawn world tour in the city where his career first got off the ground.

However, the Rogers outage that crippled the company’s infrastructure left thousands of fans waiting outside the doors of the Rogers Centre an hour before showtime. That’s when they were told the performance couldn’t move forward since the facility relied on Rogers network technology.

The musician, born Abel Tesfaye, issued a statement at the time saying he was “crushed and heartbroken.”

The Rogers outage also affected 911 operations, small businesses, financial networks and other critical services across Canada.

The company said the disruption was due to a maintenance update in its core network, which caused some of its routers to malfunction.

Last week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission asked Rogers to provide a detailed explanation for the service outage by July 22, including why and how it occurred and what measures it is putting in place to prevent it from happening again.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 18, 2022.