Rogers’ 5-day refund not enough to cover damage from outage: legal expert

Communications Inc. said it was listening to its customers from across the country and recognized how significant the impacts of the outage were for them.

Rogers Communications Inc.’s move to credit its customers with the equivalent of five days of service following the massive outage that crippled its network last week is “wholly inadequate,” a legal expert said.

“Five days is predicated on the possible belief that damage to individuals and small and medium-sized businesses can be quantified solely on the basis of a portion of a monthly fee,” Richard Leblanc, a York University governance, law and ethics professor, said in an interview Wednesday.

Payments could not occur, sales were missed, meetings were missed, work could not be done, and businesses could not operate fully, so damages would be broader than that, Leblanc explained.

Rogers made the announcement via a statement posted on Twitter on Tuesday saying that it was “a first step” in earning back its customers’ trust.

“They’re keeping the door open to do more and showing goodwill as an initial first step, but it’s a minimum,” Leblanc said.

In the statement, Rogers said it was listening to its customers from across the country and recognized how significant the impacts of the outage were for them.

Rogers wireless and internet customers were left without service in the outage that began early Friday morning and led to widespread disruptions. The outage affected 911 services as well as financial networks and other critical services.

The company said the disruption that shut down its mobile and internet services across much of the country came after a maintenance update in its core network, which caused some of its routers to malfunction.