Late Saturday afternoon, Rogers said its 'networks and systems are close to fully operational' and it's probing the cause of the nationwide outage
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Calgary businesses have a fresh stockpile of unclosed tabs and I-owe-yous after a nationwide Rogers Communications outage left many unable to take payment via debit card throughout most of Friday.
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The Toronto-based telecommunications giant’s services blacked out Friday morning, leaving many customers without internet or phone access and disrupting the availability of 911 services and debit transactions across the country. Service was mostly restored by Saturday morning.
“Things are better today. Yesterday we just kind of grinded through it,” Jamesons Pub owner Harry Dimitriadis told Postmedia on Saturday. “It definitely wasn’t ideal. It slows everything down. It slows down service; it slows down the entire 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 rings true for the manager of Red’s Diner, a breakfast joint in Ramsay close to the Stampede grounds.
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“It was a very difficult time for us,” said Nichole Casey. “We had people that were like, ‘I don’t have credit and I don’t have cash,’ and ATMs weren’t letting them pull out money. It was just awful.”
Stampede is generally a big boost for businesses in and around the festival, but Casey and Dimitriadis said things are off to a slower start after the Day 1 speed bump. Both businesses are left trying to close unpaid bills left in the wake of the outage.
“Some people promised they were going to come back and pay for it … or we just had to promo it — sadly, the business will pay for that,” said Casey.
“It’s kind of nice that it was only the first day; normally, we get busier during the week as Stampede goes on and I’m so happy it was just that one day. … We are back up and going, but you could tell that it definitely took a toll yesterday.”
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Dimitriadis said he’s not too worried about the open tabs, saying many of them were regulars he trusts will be back soon. He noted multiple interactions he overheard as the business crowd poured in for lunch, unwillingly unglued from their devices and unable to contact colleagues or check their work email during their lunch hour.
“Literally, you could see (people) panicking because of the anxiety they were getting. We just all work in real-time nowadays, right?” he said, adding he felt it too as he made his way between the pub’s two locations, having to pull over 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 texts. … It’s shocking how exposed we are when we don’t have any ability to access our technology right now.”
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Despite the opening-day troubles with payment, the Calgary Stampede broke its Day 1 daily attendance record with 130,177 people coming through the gates. In 2019, the first day of Stampede saw 127,777 admissions.
“I think like everybody yesterday, we were impacted in a big way by Rogers … a lot of people were affected in terms of our guests, but also our vendors,” said Stampede spokesperson Kristen Anderson.
“We had lots of cash machines on hand and accept multiple forms of payments, so it was a challenge, but we tried to overcome it as best we could.”
Anderson said debit services at the Stampede were working again Saturday.
Calgary Nose Hill MP Michelle Rempel Garner is urging a government investigation to probe how the outage occurred to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Rempel Garner has previously called for reform of regulations in Canada’s telecom industry.
“This outage underscores another potential risk provided by the current federal regulatory structure. That is, potential significant national vulnerability to a prolonged service outage given the lack of diversity in Canada’s telecommunications providers,” she wrote in a Friday letter to members of the federal standing committee on industry and technology.
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Late Saturday afternoon, Rogers CEO Tony Staffieri said service had been restored and that the company’s “networks and systems are close to fully operational.” In a written statement, Staffieri said the company is continuing to monitor its network for issues and investigate the root cause of the issues.
“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,” he said.
Staffieri apologized for the outage, adding that “we’re particularly troubled that some customers could not reach emergency services and we are addressing the issue as an urgent priority.”
Rogers said it will proactively credit customers for the outage, but provided no details about the amount nor how many customers were impacted. The company said it is aware of spam text messages claiming to offer the credit and that customers will be credited automatically.
— With files from The Canadian Press
Twitter: @michaelrdrguez
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMidGh0dHBzOi8vY2FsZ2FyeWhlcmFsZC5jb20vbmV3cy9sb2NhbC1uZXdzL2p1c3QtYXdmdWwtdW5wYWlkLXRhYnMtbGVmdC1hdC1jYWxnYXJ5LWJ1c2luZXNzZXMtaW4td2FrZS1vZi1yb2dlcnMtb3V0YWdl0gGiAWh0dHBzOi8vY2FsZ2FyeWhlcmFsZC5jb20vbmV3cy9sb2NhbC1uZXdzL2p1c3QtYXdmdWwtdW5wYWlkLXRhYnMtbGVmdC1hdC1jYWxnYXJ5LWJ1c2luZXNzZXMtaW4td2FrZS1vZi1yb2dlcnMtb3V0YWdlL3djbS9mMjg4Y2Y0MS0yMjE1LTRkMWMtODNiNy04OWQzN2U1OWU3Y2EvYW1wLw?oc=5
2022-07-09 22:33:40Z
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