Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne has instructed telecommunications companies to help each other in emergencies and develop communication protocols to keep people better informed.
The minister’s call follows a massive outage at Rogers Communications that left several services inaccessible for nearly 19 hours.
“So in essence, what I’ve demanded and expect the telecom companies in Canada is to enter to a formal agreement within 60 days up to date, at maximum. I think people in Canada, and certainly the CEOs of the telcos in Canada understand that I’ve said very clearly and openly that I will not allow the wholesale transfer of licenses from Shaw to Rogers, and I think this is well understood,” Champagne said.
The minister also ordered Rogers to compensate its customers for the outage.
Rogers CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Tony Staffieri apologized and took full responsibility for the outage which left millions of users stranded.
“As CEO, I take full responsibility for ensuring we at Rogers earn back your full trust,” Staffieri apologized.
Staffieri said the company had experienced a system failure “following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning.”
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.