(Ottawa) The “unacceptable” nationwide outage that affected Rogers networks will be investigated by the CRTC. Telecommunications companies will need to take “immediate action” to ensure the “resilience and reliability” of networks in Canada.
Updated at 0:09
The Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, François-Philippe Champagne, made these clarifications after talking on the phone for about an hour with the boss of Rogers Communications, Tony Staffieri, and d other leaders of telecommunications companies.
“I expressed the frustration of the more than 12 million Canadians who have been affected, of the many hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses who have been deprived of electronic payment systems, of emergency services like 911, which couldn’t function during this period,” he said.
Minister says he has ‘required’ companies to enter into ‘formal agreement’ no later than next 60 days surrounding emergency roaming and mutual assistance during outages, and develop communication protocol to better inform the public and authorities during emergencies.
Mr. Champagne also said that he expected “proactive and adequate” compensation for the people and entities affected, without however advancing on what would represent, according to him, a compensation likely to repair the harm. committed.
“Obviously, it will be up to the company to determine the nature of the compensation. […] I am aware that a request for class action has been filed, ”said Mr. Champagne in a conference call.
Class Action Request
It didn’t take long for the case to end up in court.
Monday morning, a request for class action was presented before the Superior Court of Quebec by the firm LPC Avocat. He is claiming $400 per Rogers, Fido or Chatr customer who has not received the services for which he is paying “on July 8 and/or July 9”.
On Twitter, Rogers Communications promised automatic compensation to its customers. But that wouldn’t stop a court from ordering the company to pay punitive damages, argues the attorney of record, Joey Zukran, in his request.
Because compensation for two days of use — as the company’s customer service team suggested in a tweet quoted in the document — “is utterly inadequate,” and does not take into account “other damages.” […] endured,” he wrote.
If my client receives $5 or $6 in compensation, for him, it’s not enough,” said the lawyer.
Joey Zukran, from the firm LPC Avocat at the origin of the class action request
Especially since “until the network failure”, the service provider claimed to be “the most reliable network in Canada”, and this is therefore a “misrepresentation”, is -he writes in the motion presented in court.
A first tranche of $200 is thus claimed for each client, in order to compensate for the interruption of service, and the other, of $200, for “false representation”.
The causes of the failure
Rogers Communications said the outage was caused by a maintenance update to its backbone network. Millions of Canadians were then left without mobile service or internet. This disrupted the police, courts, Service Canada, broadcasters and Interac technology, among others.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will look into this.
“They said they were going to start their investigation soon, and that’s really to understand the cause, the nature of the problem. And from there will emerge elements of a solution to know what we can do in the future, what Rogers could have done better,” explained Minister Champagne.
The outage began on Friday and ended on Saturday.
The stock fell 5%
Rogers’ stock lost 5% of its value during the first trading session of the week. The title of the Ontario telecommunications company fell 1% on Friday as its networks were paralyzed by a general outage affecting several million customers in Canada.
The cost associated with the compensation for customers affected by the outage is estimated at 70 million, an amount that will appear in quarterly results to come in the fall. The key, however, according to analyst Aravinda Galappatthige of Canaccord, is assessing the potential impact on brand and business.
Richard Dufour, The Press
With the collaboration of Marie-Eve Fournier, The Press