Rogers gains 221,000 new customers despite outrage over massive outage in July

Nov 10 2022, 4:17 pm

Rogers just revealed its financial results for the three-month period that ended on September 30, and it’s as if no paralyzing nationwide service outage happened over the summer.

The report, which was released on Wednesday, found that the telecom giant actually added 221,000 new cellphone customers since that disastrous week in July.

On top of that, the company made $371 million, coming out to a total service revenue of $3.2 billion.

“Building on this position of strength, we will continue to invest in our networks and our customers’ experience to deliver the resilience and service our customers expect,” stated Rogers President and CEO Tony Staffieri in the report.

It seems like a lot of people forgot about how debilitating that outage really was, so here’s a quick recap.

On the morning of July 8, Rogers customers began reporting connection issues across the country.

It wasn’t just limited to phone, TV, and internet services; Banks, ATMs, and debit and credit card purchases were affected. Even calls to 911 were impacted.

It turns out the outage was due to a system failure following a maintenance update in the company’s core network.

While Rogers’ network began recovering after 15 hours for most customers, many were left in the dark for days after the outage.

The report says the company has refunded approximately $150 million worth of credits related to the outage, which is reflected in a loss of revenue in its financial results.

Customers were initially furious at how little they would be compensated for the outage.

But it seems those attitudes have shifted since then, given the gains the company has made.

It may be due to the lack of choice Canadians have in service providers across the country.

This could change thanks to a recent Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) decision that green lights a policy that could increase competition among service providers and therefore lower prices for cellphone plans.

Since July, Canada’s major telecom companies have signed a deal that would ensure customers have network access in case of another outage.

Isabelle DoctoIsabelle Docto

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