Rogers crediting customers 5 days service after widespread network outage

Rogers Communications Inc. says it will credit customers five days’ service after Friday’s widespread service outage across Canada.

The network outage caused customers and businesses across the country to be without internet and mobile services, and also disrupted 9-1-1 and debit transactions.

Rogers President and CEO Tony Staffieri apologized to customers in an open letter over the weekend, saying at the time Rogers would be crediting impacted customers directly.

In a statement to CityNews, Rogers spokesperson Chloe Luciani-Girouard said:

“We have been listening to our customers and Canadians from across the country who have told us how significant the impacts of the outage were for them. We know that we need to earn back their trust, and as a first step, we will be crediting our customers with the equivalent of five days service. We will continue to work around the clock to restore Canadians’ confidence in us.”

Staffieri previously said it’s believed a network system failure, after a maintenance update, was what caused the malfunction of some routers and caused the outage.

On Monday, Canada’s industry minister instructed telecom companies to reach agreements on emergency roaming, assisting each other during outages, and a communication protocol to better inform Canadians and authorities during emergencies.

Francois-Philippe Champagne said he brought together the heads of the major telecom companies and demanded they “take immediate action to improve the resiliency and reliability of our networks by ensuring a formal arrangement is in place within 60 days.”

In an open letter on Tuesday, the CRTC ordered Rogers to provide a detailed explanation for the widespread outage by July 22, and answering the questions on the ‘why’ and ‘how’ the outage happened, as well as what measures are being put in place to prevent it from happening again.

Rogers Communications Inc. is the parent company of CityNews.