The chief executive of Rogers Communications is apologizing to the company's wireless customers across the country after part of its network went dark.
The telecom giant restored its wireless voice and text messaging services late Wednesday night after the major outage, but president and CEO Nadir Mohamed says recognizes that the service breakdown was "unacceptable."
Mohamed said technicians worked as quickly as possible to restore service, adding that he sincerely apologizes for this "significant inconvenience."
Rogers and Fido postpaid wireless customers, those on a contract and who pay monthly, will receive a credit on their bills for one day of service because of the outage.
The company's data services did not appear to be affected by the outage.
The company originally said the outage only affected customers in Ontario and Quebec. They apologized on Twitter and said it was “working to resolve (the issue) ASAP.” On their official website, they offered to “proactively credit all of [their] postpaid customers for one day of service.” The official Rogers website also went down around 7 p.m.
Toronto police said their phone lines were unaffected, but they advised residents over Twitter that Rogers calls were not working in the event that they needed to call 911.
Around 8 p.m., Fido and Chatr also reported a wireless outage nationally, affecting voice and some SMS service.
Beck Taxi tweeted that the electronic payment terminals inside the company’s cabs work through Rogers and “unfortunately, we will be unable to offer this method of payment until they are back online.”
Rogers has not yet determined what caused the problem, which produced a torrent of negative customer reaction on social media networks. The company has about 10 million wireless customers across Canada.
