For Toyko Smoke in Waterloo’s Bridgeport Plaza, service was still lackluster and slow on Saturday, July 9. “It was a complete write-off yesterday,” manager Nick Miller said. “Some trades [today]What are typically five-second transactions in a POS system can take up to five minutes.” The store was closed all day Friday because of the outage and lost about $4,000 in sales. “Those who ordered online, we couldn’t get their online orders because there was no Internet service,” Miller said. Sarah McQueen, co-owner of Recharge & Play Wellness Café, says she wonders how such an outage can be prevented. “Our phone lines are down, our Internet is down, and all of our programs and systems are running out of Internet,” McQueen said Friday. “There are ways we can deal with it, but it’s very important how much the business is affected.” Experts warned, at the height of the shutdown, technology used in healthcare was at risk. “It’s important to know that it’s not just cell phones and computers, it’s anything connected to the Rogers infrastructure,” said cybersecurity and technology consultant Ritesh Kotak. “You have VOIP lines, you have medical equipment in some cases that can have a Rogers SIM card attached.” The Ottawa-based Public Interest Advocacy Center is now asking Canada’s telecommunications regulator (CRTC) to conduct an open investigation into yesterday’s failure.
A FEW PRESENT IMPLICATIONS FOR LOCAL HOSPITALS
While no major equipment damage was reported at Waterloo Region hospitals on Friday, officials at St. Mary’s reports that some communication problems were still present as of Saturday. A spokesperson for Cambridge Memorial Hospital says their wireless and landline connections were offline, which added to the challenges the full-capacity and understaffed hospital faces, such as ER wait times. They add that they don’t expect the challenges to improve in the near term, but that patients in the ER will receive priority care. Meanwhile, Grand River Hospital officials say they have seen some delays in patient discharges and have been unable to contact family members as well as health system partners affected by the outage.
