Rogers to credit customers 5 days of service for outage
CBC
Rogers Communications says it will credit its customers for five days of service following its massive network outage last week that affected cellular and internet service for millions of Canadians.
The outage, which started Friday and lingered for many into the weekend, also disrupted government services and payment systems, prompting criticism and questions from the federal government and telecommunications regulator.
"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," Chloe Luciani-Girouard, a spokeswoman for Rogers Communications, said in an email to CBC News.
"We know that we need to earn back their trust."
She described the credit as a "first step."
Rogers blames the outage on a network system failure following a maintenance update in its core network.
The company previously said it would be "proactively crediting" all affected customers and that this credit would be automatically applied to their accounts.
But there were reports Rogers would credit customers for just two days of lost service — working out to $4 to $6 per cellular and internet service, industry analyst Vince Valentini with TD Bank wrote in a TD Securities note.
Some had suggested that was not enough, given the scope of the damage.
David Soberman, the Canadian national chair of strategic marketing at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, said earlier that the company needed to rebate customers for at least a week of service.
"That would probably be the bare minimum," he said.
He suggested Rogers needed to learn a simple rule of business: If customers don't feel they are being treated the right way, they leave.
"If they lose five, six, seven per cent of their customers, that's going to be way worse than [paying out] a week's worth of [compensation]," Soberman said.
Last week was the second time in as many years Rogers has been rocked by a major outage; the company's wireless and cable networks went down in a similar fashion in April 2021. At the time, Rogers blamed a software update at one of its equipment suppliers.
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