Class action lawsuit over massive Rogers outage approved

The Superior Court of Quebec has given the go-ahead to a class action lawsuit against Rogers and its subsidiaries, Fido and Chatr, over a national outage that occurred in April 2021.

The Quebec-based law firm Lex Group published a notice regarding the lawsuit's approval, and several Rogers customers received text messages notifying them of the authorized class action. Some recipients took to social media to ask if the text was a scam — understandable, given how prevalent scams are these days and how often we see scams related to telecom outages.

According to the notice, the lawsuit alleges that members of the class suffered damages due to a service interruption that occurred on Rogers' wireless network starting on April 19, 2021. This isn't to be confused with the infamous July 2022 outage that took out Rogers' wireless and internet service for multiple days across Canada.

Screenshot of a text sent to Rogers customers about the lawsuit.

If the lawsuit is successful, class members may be eligible to receive compensation, including reimbursement of service or subscription fees, as well as other compensatory and/or punitive damages. It's worth noting that class members don't have to pay for the attorney fees — instead, those are taken from the damages awarded through the class action, or Rogers may have to pay the fees if the court decides.

For now, there's nothing you need to do (unless you want to be excluded from the class action). The next step for the lawsuit will be a trial to determine the validity of the claims. Those who wish to be excluded from the class action must notify the clerk of the Superior Court of Quebec in the district of Montreal by Nov. 23, 2025.

"We're continually investing to bring Canadians the best network experience. We have already credited our customers and look forward to defending the case," a Rogers spokesperson said regarding the lawsuit.

The outage took place on April 19, 2021, and Rogers restored service to most customers the following day. It impacted wireless calls, SMS, and data services. At the time, Rogers blamed the outage on an Ericsson software update, and it offered bill credits to impacted customers.