Rogers mobile and internet customers hit with internet outages across Canada, Friday, July 8, 2022. Photo by Peter J. Thompson /Postmedia

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Calgary businesses have a new supply of unclosed tabs and I owe you after a nationwide Rogers Communications outage left many unable to take payment by debit card for most of Friday.

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The Toronto-based telecommunications giant’s services went out Friday morning, leaving many customers without internet or phone access and disrupting the availability of 911 services and billing transactions across the country. Service was mostly restored by Saturday morning. “Things are better today. Yesterday we got over it,” Jamesons Pub owner Haris Dimitriadis told Postmedia on Saturday. “It was definitely not ideal. It slows everything down. It slows down the service. it slows down the whole operation.” Deborah Yedlin, president and CEO of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, called it a “nightmare” scenario for local businesses as the Calgary Stampede kicked off Friday, which is true for the manager of Red’s Diner, a Ramsay diner near the Stampede. . reasons.

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“It was a very difficult time for us,” Nichole Casey said. “We had people saying ‘I have no credit and no cash’ and the ATMs wouldn’t let them take money out. It was just awful.” The Stampede is generally a big boost for businesses in and around the festival, but Casey and Dimitriadis said things are starting to slow down after the speed bump of Day 1. Both businesses are left scrambling to close unpaid bills that were left in the wake of the shutdown. “Some people promised they would come back and pay for it … or we just had to push it — unfortunately, the business will pay for it,” Casey said. “It’s kind of cool that it was only the first day. normally we are busier during the week as the Stampede continues and I’m so glad it was just this one day. … We’re back and forth, but you could tell it definitely took the weight yesterday.”

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Dimitriadis said he’s not too worried about the open tabs, saying many of them were regulars who he trusts will return soon. He noted multiple overheard interactions as the business crowd spilled out for lunch, unwittingly disconnecting from their devices and unable to communicate with colleagues or check their work email during lunch. “You could literally see (people) panicking because of the stress they were getting. We’re all just working in real time today, right?’ he said, adding that he felt it too as he made his way between the pub’s two locations, and had to find WiFi so he could check in with his employees. “I’m a Rogers customer, so I wasn’t getting emails, I wasn’t getting messages. … It’s shocking how exposed we are when we don’t have any access to our technology right now.”

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Many businesses across Canada were unable to accept debit card transactions Friday due to a network outage at Rogers Communications. Photo by Halfpoint/Getty Images/iStockphoto Despite opening day payment issues, the Calgary Stampede broke the Day 1 daily attendance record with 130,177 people through the gates. In 2019, the first day of the Stampede had 127,777 entries. “I think like everybody yesterday, we were greatly affected by Rogers … a lot of people were affected in terms of our guests, but also our vendors,” Stampede spokeswoman Kristen Anderson said. “We had a lot of cash registers at our disposal and we were accepting multiple forms of payment, so it was a challenge, but we tried to overcome it as best we could.” Anderson said billing services at the Stampede were back up and running Saturday. Calgary Nose Hill MP Michelle Rempel Garner is urging a government inquiry to investigate how the outage happened to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Rebel Garner has previously called for regulatory reform in Canada’s telecommunications industry. “This outage highlights another potential risk provided by the current federal regulatory structure. That is, potential significant national vulnerability to prolonged service disruption given the lack of diversity in Canada’s telecommunications providers,” she wrote in a letter Friday to members of the federal standing committee on industry and technology.

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I have just written to all the MPs on the Industry Standing Committee and asked them to hold an emergency committee meeting to put an end to the Rogers shutdown and make sure it doesn’t happen again. I wrote a motion that they could pass. https://t.co/gFCyAG7Q7A — Michelle Rempel Garner (@MichelleRempel) July 9, 2022
Late Saturday afternoon, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said service had been restored and the company’s networks and systems were almost fully operational. In a written statement, Staffieri said the company continues to monitor its network for problems and investigate the root cause of the problems. “We now believe we have narrowed down the cause of a network system failure following a maintenance update to our core network which caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning,” he said. Staffieri apologized for the disruption, adding that “we are extremely concerned that some customers were unable to contact the emergency services and are treating the matter as an urgent priority”. Rogers said it would proactively credit customers for the outage, but did not provide details on the amount or how many customers were affected. The company said it is aware of spam text messages claiming to offer the credit and that customers will be automatically credited. — With files from the Canadian Press [email protected] Twitter: @michaelrdrguez

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