Rogers Is Back Up For The Majority Of Their Customers… Here’s What I Think Of This Rogers Outage
Over 24 hours after Rogers had all its services go down yesterday with massive knock on effects, things seem to be coming back on line. Now if you don’t have your services back at this point, here’s what I suggest:
- Reboot the modem by unplugging it from power for 30 seconds, then plugging it back in.
- If that doesn’t work, go away from an hour or so and try the above again.
My residential and business customers have had success with the above.
Now with that out of the way, here’s what I think of this outage. Starting with the way that Rogers handled this. Which is badly. It took Rogers four hours after the outage started before they said anything on Twitter.
And the above Tweet brings up another point. Rogers has a tendency to put out some incredibly condescending Tweets with phrases like “We know how important it is for our customers to stay connected” and “Service interruptions are never fun to deal with.” That is a complete #Fail and all it does frustrate customers because it creates the impression that Rogers doesn’t care. My advice to Rogers on that front is to change their communication style and stop doing that going forward. Also, if you have a major outage, four hours before you say anything is not acceptable. EVER. Especially considering the media was reporting this outage for hours before Rogers said anything.
Now Rogers did put out some updates throughout Friday that didn’t really say much of anything. Which is bad in it itself. But what was worse is that Rogers later on Friday sent out a VP to speak to CBC about this. And it didn’t go well:
This to be frank was one of the worst interviews that I have ever seen. The first #Fail is that there was no apology from this guy on behalf of Rogers. That’s frankly unacceptable. The second is that he was clearly given talking points by the Rogers PR department that he clearly stuck to. But they were talking points that offered up zero information. Now I get that they may not have had an understanding of what happened, but surely he could have done better than this. The bottom line is that this will end up being the case study of how not to handle a crisis like this.
Now Rogers was finally able to get things online by Saturday. At least to the point where the “vast majority” of their customers were online according to this Tweet:
I might dispute that, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole today. Instead, I will point this out. Roger’s CEO put out a statement:
This statement was posted roughly 15 hours or more after the outage started. That’s way too long for the guy who heads Rogers to say anything about an outage that was as catastrophic as this one was seeing as this outage affected debit card payments, 9-1-1 services among other things. From a comms perspective, this is way too long. And if you read the statement, it really comes across as being hollow and does not commit to explaining what the root cause of this was. That does not give me confidence that Rogers is going to improve things and reassure me or anyone else that this will not happen again.
Oh, for bonus points, the about.rogers.com domain appears not on the Rogers network and is not in Canada. That in it itself says a fair amount about Rogers confidence in their own network.
Here’s the bottom line: Rogers has lost a lot goodwill because of this incident and they will have a lot of hard questions to answer in the coming days. They really botched the response and that bad response will not help them in general, never mind in terms of trying to close the deal with Shaw as many will feel that Friday’s events is a taste of things to come if Rogers is able to buy Shaw. That’s underlined by this Tweet from the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry:
If you’re Rogers, that’s not a message that they want to see.
On top of that, I know that they will lose customers over this incident as next week I have several of my residential customers and business customers requesting my services to help them to transition to Bell or some other ISP that doesn’t use Rogers infrastructure.
Rogers has really dropped the ball here with their second major outage in 15 months. A credit of a few bucks isn’t going to cut it. Rogers is going to have to do far more to regain the trust of Canadians…. Assuming that they have it within them to actually be able to do that.
Oh. One other thing. If you have to call Rogers today or in the days to come, please keep in mind what Hayley Farb (who used to work for Rogers and I know personally) has to say:
The front line Rogers staff are not the people you should be mad at. So please be kind to them. They don’t deserve your ire. However if you want to direct your ire at someone, I would suggest that you direct your ire at Tony Staffieri and Edward Rogers as those are the people who are ultimately responsible for Rogers absolute disaster that they had on Friday.
July 10, 2022 at 6:09 pm
[…] absolutely devastating nationwide outage on Friday, which if you’re keeping score at home is the second one in 15 months, all is almost fine in the universe. But that isn’t the case and even Rogers admits […]