Rogers CEO Apologizes for Outage: I Take Full Responsibility to Earn Back Your Trust

To say today was a bad day for Rogers is an understatement. After over 15 hours of outages, wireless services have only started to become partly restored. Any company or service connected to Rogers saw downtime according to Downdetector, including the likes of Interac, RBC, Scotiabank, TekSavvy, Visa and more.

Now, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri has penned a letter apologizing for today’s downtime.

“Dear Canadians,” writes the Rogers CEO, “we know you count on Rogers to connect you to emergency services, make payments, serve your customers, connect with work and keep in touch with friends and family. We take that responsibility very seriously and today we let you down. We can and will do better.”

“As you know, we experienced a network outage across both wireless and wireline service that began early this morning,” said Staffieri.

“We have made meaningful progress towards bringing our networks back online and many of our wireless customers are starting to see services return. We don’t yet have an ETA on when our networks will be fully restored but we will continue to share information with our customers as we restore full service.”

The Rogers CEO does not detail the root cause of why the nationwide network outage occurred.

Below are just some of the services impacted by the Rogers outage today, showing just how interconnected various networks are in Canada:

“We know going a full day without connectivity has real impacts on our customers, and all Canadians. On behalf of all of us here at Rogers, Rogers for Business, Fido, chatr and cityfone, I want to sincerely apologize for this service interruption and the impact it is having on people from coast to coast to coast,” said the CEO.

Staffieri then said he would make two commitments to Canadians:

• First, we are working to fully understand the root cause of this outage and we will make all the changes necessary to ensure that in the future we meet and exceed your expectations for our networks.
• Second, we will make this right for our valued customers. We will proactively apply a credit to all our customers impacted by the outage and will share more details shortly.

While the Rogers CEO says, “I take full responsibility”, it’s only “for ensuring we at Rogers earn back your full trust, and are once again there to connect you to what matters,” and not for the ongoing network outage.