EPISODE 1: Dodgy Rogers

Speaker 1 (00:06):

You are listening to The Crisis Beat with Dr. Mark k Crower and Brady Wood.

Speaker 2 (00:16):

All right. Hi everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the Crisis Beat. This podcast is aimed at dissecting recent crisis communications practices and identifying where major companies fall flat at the risk of their entire businesses. So, welcome to the podcast. With me today is my co-host, Dr. Mark Crower, who wearing his other hat is the chair of the Department of Medicine at McMaster University. I'm Brady Wood, and I am a consultant and business owner and a communications professional. So today's episode, we are examining the July 8th shutdown of Rogers Telecommunications Services across, uh, across Canada and its impacts, and also how that team at that company responded to this crisis. So I, I think we'll start with, um, Mark, I guess we'll look at and chat a bit about what happened to the consumer and what this this really meant. So in my thinking, I was trying to give an equivalent to us, uh, US listeners, but this would be the equivalent of like at and t, Verizon and T-Mobile all going down on the same day across the country with very little explanation. And so in candidates, we, we really have, Mark, would you agree with me? It's, we, we kind of have two major telecommunications companies.

Speaker 3 (01:32):

Yeah, there's, there's, there's a number of providers, but of the major providers, uh, and of the name brand providers, cuz each of the name brand providers has a bargain basement version of themselves that are linked and, and use the same network. Uh, there really are 2.5 a and then a number of smaller providers. And I will say, Brady, before we get kickoff, it's probably important for the listeners to know that neither one of us are paid employees of Rogers, nor are we computer geeks, nor do we have any particular insight into what actually happened. We only can read the media reports as everybody else can, but I think as we were discussing before we got rolling on recording this, we both were personally affected by this. And so we have some insight into exactly what happened and some of the impact that it could have.

Speaker 2 (02:13):

Yeah. That, that's, so that's a wise, uh, place to start in a way. I, I, I, I just check this, Mark and Rogers has the greatest market share of the mobile market at 31.6%. So a full third of mobile users are on, on Rogers. And this also affected their, the internet service. So, so for me, I, I, as we were talking about earlier on the day of that, that evening, I was doing some testing of a, of a technology, um, company that I'm working with. And my messages stopped flowing to my phone at around 8:00 PM and the next day, we went the entire day without any hint of why the service was out, uh, at least initially. Um, and had no, no ability to phone or, or use the internet if you, you were on Roger's service, either computer, internet, or phone.

Speaker 3 (02:59):

And I was, uh, literally traveling to England touchdown the following morning in England. So in the middle of the night North American time, uh, effectively. And the flight attendant doing the briefing when we landed, stated that if you were trying to connect through a Rogers phone, the Rogers network was down. And so it was an in, it was a national event of international importance. And I would also say that I think everybody's heard about the discombobulation at airports, particularly Canadian airports over the last couple of months. And there were a large number of, uh, changes that I had to make on our flights within hours of departure. So if this had happened four hours sooner, uh, basically my son and I would've been sced because I had a long phone call with Air Canada trying to reschedule a flight after they canceled a flight. So I think that just reiterates not only that this was, you know, a domestic problem, but it had international ramifications. And we are all unbelievably dependent on our cell phones now for all kinds of stuff, which we weren't even 10 years ago.