Rogers Communications says it will credit its customers for five days of service following its massive network outage last week that affected cellular and internet service for millions of Canadians.
The outage, which started Friday and lingered for many into the weekend, also disrupted government services and payment systems, prompting criticism and questions from the federal government and telecommunications regulator.
“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,” Chloe Luciani-Girouard, a spokeswoman for Rogers Communications, said in an email to CBC News.
“We know that we need to earn back their trust.”
She described the credit as a “first step.”
Rogers blames the outage on a network system failure following a maintenance update in its core network.
The company previously said it would be “proactively crediting” all affected customers and that this credit would be automatically applied to their accounts.
But there were reports Rogers would credit customers for just two days of lost service — working out to $4 to $6 per cellular and internet service, industry analyst Vince Valentini with TD Bank wrote in a TD Securities note.
Some had suggested that was not enough, given the scope of the damage.
Rogers blames the outage on a network system failure following a maintenance update in its core network. (Galit Rodan/The Canadian Press)
David Soberman, the Canadian national chair of strategic marketing at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said earlier that the company needed to rebate customers for at least a week of service.
“That would probably be the bare minimum,” he said.
He suggested Rogers needed to learn a simple rule of business: If customers don’t feel they are being treated the right way, they leave.
WATCH | Contract protects Rogers:
Technology and law expert discusses compensation for Rogers’ customers
2 days ago
Duration 2:15
Rogers Communications has an ‘elaborate limitation of liability clause’ in its contract with residential customers, which limits what the company has to pay to customers following issues like the big network outage on Friday, says Marina Pavlović, interim co-director at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa.
“If they lose five, six, seven per cent of their customers, that’s going to be way worse than [paying out] a week’s worth of [compensation],” Soberman said.
Last week was the second time in as many years Rogers has been rocked by a major outage; the company’s wireless and cable networks went down in a similar fashion in April 2021. At the time, Rogers blamed a software update at one of its equipment suppliers.
In 2021, the company offered customers rebates for their services, which ended up working out to a few dollars per customer.
The Toronto-based communications giant reported a quarterly net income last January of $405 million.
Rogers says it provides services to around 11.3 million subscribers in the Canadian wireless market.
‘Huge financial hit’
According to Rogers residential service agreement, if an outage lasts longer than four hours, customers are entitled to a day of credit to their account for each service they have, Marina Pavlović, interim co-director at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa, told CBC News Network anchor Aarti Pole.
A customer with home internet and a cellphone from the company, for example, would be entitled to compensation for the cost of a day of service for each product, she said.
“Most people haven’t really read that contract so they didn’t even know that that’s there.”
In its terms of service, Pavlović says Rogers has an elaborate limitation of liability clause, reducing its obligations on a number of fronts, including service outages.
“And that clause actually says ‘we don’t guarantee uninterrupted service,'” she said. “Whether that’s right or not is a completely different issue.”
Among big telecommunications firms, Rogers is not unique in limiting its own liability for outages, she added. “Every telecommunications service provider has clauses like this.”
David Finch, a professor of marketing at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, who previously worked for Rogers, says that if he was still working at the company, he would advise them to offer every affected customer a month of free service.
Such a move would likely be a “huge financial hit,” he said, but it could end the anger now, “as opposed to drip, drip, drip.”
Dan Kelly, head of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said on Monday that he feels business owners should be given a free month of Rogers service to make up for the outage, which came as companies are still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There are businesses in Canada that have been closed down for over 400 days … over the last two years, and so every single day of sales is absolutely critical in this recovery period,” he told The Canadian Press.
“It was just brutal … and far more than an inconvenience. This was cutting into very limited income at a very critical period.”
LISTEN | Big Telecom’s control in Canada:
Front Burner22:10Rogers outage and Big Telecom’s control in Canada
A massive network outage at Rogers Communications shut down mobile and internet services across much of Canada. Millions of people found themselves offline, but the widespread impact of the outage also meant business owners couldn’t process debit card payments and many 911 services couldn’t receive incoming calls. The mass disruption has put Canada’s telecommunications sector under the microscope. Three companies dominate the market and underpin some of the most basic services that are relied upon across the country. Today, Ben Klass, a member of the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, explains the stranglehold that Rogers, Bell and Telus have on Canadian telecommunications and what, if anything, can be done about it.
MONCTON, N.B. – New Brunswick RCMP say two youths have been arrested after an emergency alert was issued Monday evening about someone carrying a gun in the province’s southeast.
Caledonia Region Mounties say they were first called out to Main Street in the community of Salisbury around 7 p.m. on reports of a shooting.
A 48-year-old man was found at the scene suffering from gunshot wounds and he was rushed to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Police say in the interest of public safety, they issued an Alert Ready message at 8:15 p.m. for someone driving a silver Ford F-150 pickup truck and reportedly carrying a firearm with dangerous intent in the Salisbury and Moncton area.
Two youths were arrested without incident later in the evening in Salisbury, and the alert was cancelled just after midnight Tuesday.
Police are still looking for the silver pickup truck, covered in mud, with possible Nova Scotia licence plate HDC 958. They now confirm the truck was stolen from Central Blissville.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Golf Canada has set an impressive stretch goal of having 30 professional golfers at the highest levels of the sport by 2032.
The World Junior Girls Golf Championship is a huge part of that target.
Credit Valley Golf and Country Club will host the international tournament from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, with 24 teams representing 23 nations — Canada gets two squads — competing. Lindsay McGrath, a 17-year-old golfer from Oakville, Ont., said she’s excited to be representing Canada and continue to develop her game.
“I’m really grateful to be here,” said McGrath on Monday after a news conference in Credit Valley’s clubhouse in Mississauga, Ont. “It’s just such an awesome feeling being here and representing our country, wearing all the logos and being on Team Canada.
“I’ve always wanted to play in this tournament, so it’s really special to me.”
McGrath will be joined by Nobelle Park of Oakville, Ont., and Eileen Park of Red Deer, Alta., on Team Canada 2. All three earned their places through a qualifying tournament last month.
“I love my teammates so much,” said McGrath. “I know Nobelle and Eileen very well. I’m just so excited to be with them. We have such a great relationship.”
Shauna Liu of Maple, Ont., Calgary’s Aphrodite Deng and Clairey Lin make up Team Canada 2. Liu earned her exemption following her win at the 2024 Canadian Junior Girls Championship while Deng earned her exemption as being the low eligible Canadian on the world amateur golf ranking as of Aug. 7.
Deng was No. 175 at the time, she has since improved to No. 171 and is Canada’s lowest-ranked player.
“I think it’s a really great opportunity,” said Liu. “We don’t really get that many opportunities to play with people from across the world, so it’s really great to meet new people and play with them.
“It’s great to see maybe how they play and take parts from their game that we might also implement our own games.”
Golf Canada founded the World Junior Girls Golf Championship in 2014 to fill a void in women’s international competition and help grow its own homegrown talent. The hosts won for the first time last year when Vancouver’s Anna Huang, Toronto’s Vanessa Borovilos and Vancouver’s Vanessa Zhang won team gold and Huang earned individual silver.
Medallists who have gone on to win on the LPGA Tour include Brooke Henderson of Smiths Falls, Ont., who was fourth in the individual competition at the inaugural tournament. She was on Canada’s bronze-medal team in 2014 with Selena Costabile of Thornhill, Ont., and Calgary’s Jaclyn Lee.
Other notable competitors who went on to become LPGA Tour winners include Angel Yin and Megan Khang of the United States, as well as Yuka Saso of the Philippines, Sweden’s Linn Grant and Atthaya Thitikul of Thailand.
“It’s not if, it’s when they’re going to be on the LPGA Tour,” said Garrett Ball, Golf Canada’s chief operating officer, of how Canada’s golfers in the World Junior Girls Championship can be part of the organization’s goal to have 30 pros in the LPGA and PGA Tours by 2032.
“Events like this, like the She Plays Golf festival that we launched two years ago, and then the CPKC Women’s Open exemptions that we utilize to bring in our national team athletes and get the experience has been important in that pathway.”
The individual winner of the World Junior Girls Golf Championship will earn a berth in next year’s CPKC Women’s Open at nearby Mississaugua Golf and Country Club.
Both clubs, as well as former RBC Canadian Open host site Glen Abbey Golf Club, were devastated by heavy rains through June and July as the Greater Toronto Area had its wettest summer in recorded history.
Jason Hanna, the chief operating officer of Credit Valley Golf and Country Club, said that he has seen the Credit River flood so badly that it affected the course’s playability a handful of times over his nearly two decades with the club.
Staff and members alike came together to clean up the course after the flooding was over, with hundreds of people coming together to make the club playable again.
“You had to show up, bring your own rake, bring your own shovel, bring your own gloves, and then we’d take them down to the golf course, assign them to areas where they would work, and then we would do a big barbecue down at the halfway house,” said Hanna. “We got guys, like, 80 years old, putting in eight-hour days down there, working away.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEW YORK (AP) — Fenway Park has the Ted Williams seat. And now Citi Field has the Grimace seat.
The kid-friendly McDonald’s character made another appearance at the ballpark Monday, when the New York Mets unveiled a commemorative purple seat in section 302 to honor “his special connection to Mets fans.”
Wearing his pear-shaped purple costume and a baseball glove on backwards, Grimace threw out a funny-looking first pitch — as best he could with those furry fingers and short arms — before New York beat the Miami Marlins at Citi Field on June 12.
That victory began a seven-game winning streak, and Grimace the Mets’ good-luck charm soon went viral, taking on a life of its own online.
New York is 53-31 since June 12, the best record in the majors during that span. The Mets were tied with rival Atlanta for the last National League playoff spot as they opened their final homestand of the season Monday night against Washington.
The new Grimace seat in the second deck in right field — located in row 6, seat 12 to signify 6/12 on the calendar — was brought into the Shannon Forde press conference room Monday afternoon. The character posed next to the chair and with fans who strolled into the room.
The seat is available for purchase for each of the Mets’ remaining home games.
“It’s been great to see how our fanbase created the Grimace phenomenon following his first pitch in June and in the months since,” Mets senior vice president of partnerships Brenden Mallette said in a news release. “As we explored how to further capture the magic of this moment and celebrate our new celebrity fan, installing a commemorative seat ahead of fan appreciation weekend felt like the perfect way to give something back to the fans in a fun and unique way.”
Up in Boston, the famous Ted Williams seat is painted bright red among rows of green chairs deep in the right-field stands at Fenway Park to mark where a reported 502-foot homer hit by the Hall of Fame slugger landed in June 1946.
So, does this catapult Grimace into Splendid Splinter territory?
“I don’t know if we put him on the same level,” Mets executive vice president and chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg said with a grin.
“It’s just been a fun year, and at the same time, we’ve been playing great ball. Ever since the end of May, we have been crushing it,” he explained. “So I think that added to the mystique.”
