After a nationwide shutdown last week, Canadian mobile and internet company Rogers says it will give credit to millions of its customers.
In a statement posted late Tuesday, the firm said users would receive “the equivalent of five days of service”. The shutdown, which lasted more than 15 hours, also affected transport, banking and emergency services.
Regulators have ordered the company to provide an account of the “why” and “how” of the disruption.
Rogers is one of the largest telecommunications companies in Canada, with over 11 million customers.
The firm has been “listening to customers from across the country who have told us how significant the outage impacts were for them”. A tweet said it would credit customers with five days’ worth of service instead of the two days it had previously offered.
“The national outage of telecom services that millions of Canadians experienced in the last few days is unacceptable. Full stop,” Canada’s industry minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said in a tweet on Monday.
He said he had gathered the leaders of significant telecoms companies “to demand they take immediate action to improve the resiliency and reliability of our networks”.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, which regulates the sector, said it was seeking “a detailed account from Rogers as to ‘why’ and ‘how’ this happened, as well as what measures Rogers is putting in place to prevent future outages”.
Some bank machines were offline during the blackout. At the same time, phone numbers of several emergency services reported difficulties with incoming calls, and hospitals asked on-call staff to come to work until the problem was resolved.
During outages, people flocked to coffee shops and libraries with working Wi-Fi.
The three companies, Rogers, Bell Canada and Telus Corp, control 90% of the telecommunications market in Canada. Critics say the outage demonstrated the need for more competition in the country’s telecommunications sector.