Rogers Communications says it will compensate customers for five days’ worth of service following a massive outage that affected phone, internet, TV and other services.
“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,” the company said in a statement. “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.”
The announcement comes a day after Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said that some customers were still experiencing problems days after the outage started Friday.
“We will continue to work around the clock to restore Canadians’ confidence in us,” the company said in its statement Tuesday.
The compensation is unlikely to satisfy some businesses, which have said that the outage cost them several days’ worth of lost revenue.
Dan Kelly, the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, has said that he has been seeing calls from small business owners for Rogers to compensate customers for lost sales that resulted from the outage.
The outage knocked out debit payments and some credit card payment systems.
On Tuesday the CEO of fast food conglomerate MTY Food Group Inc. told BNN that the outage cost his company tens of millions of dollars in sales and he said they are still tallying the exact cost.
“We'll take it as a learning experience. I think, for everyone, our dependence on one carrier might be a problem,” CEO Eric Lefebvre said.
The outage also prompted Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne to call a meeting of telecom executives, where he gave them 60 days to come up with contingency plans for helping one another cope with large outages going forward.
