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:
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.
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I don’t think there has ever been a major cellphone carrier in North America with downed Internet and Phone for as long a duration as Rogers has today. Absolutely unacceptable. Redundant Systems and Backups, completely useless.
My proposal is that each province contains its own data hub and phone hub, so that something like this can never be Canada-wide again, and is only limited to the province with the affected hub. There is no point in centralizing all of this if all it takes is an unknown failure to cause a country-wide outage.
You mean something like a cell structure? :-]
I am a Fido user and have come to realize how a cell phone without network can affect my life that much. We used to have no data 10 years ago and we were doing fine. It’s shocking to think about it.
Instead of pointing fingers and calling names, we need to find the root cause and prevent it from happening again.
No, we need to also point fingers
If this guy was sorry he would’ve let go of the Shaw deal. They clearly are incapable of reliably operating what they already have. We don’t need more Canadians left at the mercy of such complacent, stale leadership.
“I take full responsibility” That means resigning. If there are no consequences to taking full responsibility, then you’re not taking any responsibility. At all.
Apology not accepted. Who will lose their job over this? Meaning which executive? Even though we pay triple the prices we should be paying for most plans we still get third world quality of services in this country. What will the government do about the lack of competition? Nothing, they’ll wait for this to blow over and then everyone tells us how great the service in the country is.
Dear Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri:
In my life I was taught an adage that rings true over and over again and it goes like this “money talks and b*ll-shit walks.
Maybe if you step up and show how sincere your apology is by making some financial amends to the customer base that were “inconvenienced” from your company’s failing to deliver its paid for service, perhaps you will be taken more serious.
Until then, Rogers will be known as putting its profit over customer service and will be continued to be known as a second class entity.
Signed an ex-customer:
db
In a nice turn of events..I got Bhell fibre installed the day before the outage and also this week extended my Videotron plan. Too funny.
In a nice turn of events..I got Bhell fibre installed the day before the outage and also this week extended my Videotron plan. Too funny.
I was expecting changes internally after last year’s full day outage… More redundancy, better QA at all levels, more planning, more technically savvy staff, more senior staff for major upgrades etc.
I can see that none of this happened, the culture still hasn’t changed. Bickering up at the top about share prices and ownership where no one up there cares about the actual network quality.
Why? All that you mentioned costs money. It’s a LOT cheaper to give everyone a 2$ discount on this month’s bill than to beef up the core of the network (obviously, this was a core meltdown but the clowns can’t be bothered to provide details). I wonder who the “vendor” they were”actively working with” is. Hint: not my company 😇
Transparency in Kanukistan? No way Jose.
give us deals!
Not sure if anyone saw the interview with the VP of operations on CTV…. I’m amazed that you can even ping, let alone pass traffic with that guy in charge. Unprepared, clueless, distracted, seemed more concerned about his job than about the impact.
The dude needs to go. Don’t remember the name, look up the YT clip.
Oh…and having a CFO run a technology driven company…hmmm…you might get just that “sincere” apology and no core redundancy.