Yesterday Rogers announced its first quarter earnings and during the company’s conference call, CEO Joe Natale touched on the company’s nationwide wireless outage that happened on Monday (via CP24).
Rogers saw its total net income rise to $361 million, up 3% from the year-ago quarter, on revenue of $3.4 billion, up 2% compared to the year ago quarter. The company now has 9.727 million postpaid and 1.204 million prepaid subscribers as of March 31, 2021.
During the earnings call, Canaccord Genuity analyst, Aravinda Galappatthige, asked the company if there were “any sort of learnings from, sort of, the outage from a couple of days ago that you can share?”.
Joe Natale, Rogers President and CEO, responded to say “after the recent software upgrade, it lead to congestion and service impacts for many customers across the country,” referring to the Ericsson update blamed for the widespread wireless outage.
“I am deeply disappointed that our customers had to experience that problem. Our team is deeply disappointed. We worked very hard to earn the trust of our customers, and we’re going to work very hard to earn it back,” explained Natale.
“Despite, all the testing that we did with respect to the software upgrade, it simply [caused] the problems and it took us a while to recover. Problem really started in the middle of the night on Monday where we started seeing intermittent failure — intermittent connectivity, inability for customers to connect, and for the better part of about 16-hours before we can get things back to normal,” added the Rogers CEO.
According to Natale, the Rogers team “worked diligently” to restore wireless services “as quickly as we possibly could.”
“You have my commitment and you have the commitment of Ericsson, I’ve had a number of conversations with their CEO in the last few days that we’re not just going to get through the bottom of this, but worked very hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” said Natale.
Many have noted online it’s worrisome a software update could take down the entire Rogers network for a full day.
The Rogers CEO concluded, “connectivity more than ever is important part of what we all have learned to rely on. And at the heart of it, it’s about trust and we’ve worked very hard to earn that trust as I’ve said, and we’re going to work very hard to regain that trust with customers that have had difficult time during that period on Monday.”
Rogers later announced it would be crediting customers one day of wireless service due to the service outage.
