Canadian restaurant franchisor MTY Food Group is claiming it lost “tens of millions of dollars in sales” because of last week’s nationwide Rogers network outage — reports BNN Bloomberg.
With Rogers’ services offline, millions of Canadians were left without phone and internet access. However, the breakdown affected more than just individual consumers.
Businesses, government agencies, smaller telecom operators, and even banking systems like INTERAC and Visa all rely on various Rogers services that went down last week. The incident arguably caused significant economic loss to Canadian businesses. MTY, at least, estimates it was deprived of tens of millions of dollars.
“An outage of that duration is going to cause problems and for many of our franchisees that operate with Rogers, you know, not only (debit) cards were not available but even credit cards for a large portion of our franchisees, and that happened on the Friday which is one of the top days of the week,” said MTY CEO Eric Lefebvre in a Tuesday interview.
“It cost us, we’re still counting, but it’s tens of millions of dollars in sales.” According to Lefebvre, his team is taking this as a wake-up call and may consider supplementing the restaurant chain’s network coverage with service from another carrier.
Experts are calling for both citizens and businesses to do the same. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket, and diversify your network coverage to mitigate risk. After all, Rogers suffered another daylong outage last April.
Dan Kelly, president and CEO of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said some small businesses lost thousands of dollars and were unable to serve customers due to the network issues. He added that Canadian business owners are demanding “proper compensation for lost sales.”
Rogers, meanwhile, originally offered customers two days worth of credits for prorated service as recompense. The company increased the offered restitution to five days of free prorated service on Tuesday.
Researchers and critics also believe last week’s events should serve as a wake-up call for the federal government and Canada’s telecom regulator as well. The devastating downtime has shone a massive light on the need for more competition in Canada’s telecom space.
Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said on Saturday that the disruption was caused by “a network system failure following a maintenance update.” The government has ordered Rogers, Telus, and Bell to create a network safety plan, designed to prevent something like this from happening in the future, within 60 days.
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It angers me that these shortcomings will translate into more business for network operators, assuming that “diversifying network coverage to mitigate risk” means signing additional service contracts with another of the Big 3 networks.
I think this is where Elon Musk comes in with Starlink. The Always on model, so if earthly connection is lost, we can get a possibly slower one, but a fall back for faster, more local wire fed internet.
Who knows, that’s what I think though.
Starlink is a little pricey for a “backup”, no??
in all honesty, I have no idea on pricing. I just feel with all things available, that style of model I feel they’d lean more towards or would be fitting.
I’m the last person to defend Rogers but it occurs to me that when one business is that reliant or dependent on a service,
it should be carrying enough insurance in event of a mishap such as this.
Oh… yea.. me too….. (clears throat) My website didn’t get as many views, less ads got seen due to the outage. Possibly millions of dollars lost!!! Rogers must pay!! – How dare an update go wrong, I demand them host 2 servers side by side so I never lose access for a single second!
All in all. It sucks to have an outage, but it wasn’t all that long. Many found it as an excuse to boost prices by 300% for profit since the paper trail was gone when everyone switched to cash. My Mom flooded our family chat with $20 strawberries and other grossly priced things to take advantage of the situation.
What is more competition going to do, besides maybe provide a false sense of improvement?? Do they really think some startup company is going to install their own brand spanking new national network?? I doubt it, that’s why they’ve all been using the existing networks that Bell and Rogers have built over decades of infrastructure investments. The costs involved in getting even one competitor to a point of even beginning to compete would make their service too expensive to be feasible. The only other option would be to have a ton of smaller, regional networks that would be a headache to coordinate and tracking issues and assigning responsibility would be a logistical nightmare. It would actually make more sense (from a reliability standpoint) to combine the “Big 3” into one network with redundancy.
I bet Rogers would prefer you not use that “most reliable network” image… 🤣