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Rogers warns of credit scams after Friday outage

Service outage was due to "maintenance update," said Rogers CEO
phone-scam
Scam text messages are being sent to Rogers customers after a Canada-wide outage.

Rogers Communications is warning its customers to be wary of scam text messages offering credits following its Canada-wide service outage on Friday.

The company said they would be crediting all customers, who were affected from the outage, on their next bill and that "no action is required" for the credits to be applied.

Multiple Rogers users have received text messages requesting people click a link to claim a $50 credit.

"Our services were severely disrupted yesterday. We're compensating everyone affected with a $50.00 CAD indemnity. Sorry for the inconvenience we may have caused you," reads a scam text.

Rogers said they are aware of the scam text messages and are urging customers to report the spam by forwarding them to 7726 (SPAM).

The widespread disruption that shut down mobile and internet services across the country on July 8 affected communications in sectors such as health-care, law enforcement and financial industries.

Many 911 services couldn't receive incoming calls, several Canadian hospitals reported impacts and debit transactions were paused as Interac was affected by the outage.

Rogers Chief Executive Officer Tony Staffieri issued a statement on Saturday saying service was restored and the company's "networks and systems are close to fully operational," and the company is monitoring its network for problems.

“We now believe we’ve narrowed the cause to a network system failure following a maintenance update in our core network, which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning,” said Staffieri.

“We're particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority.”

-with files from Canadian Press