Rogers outage hit local businesses and emergency services

It started as early as 4 a.m. Friday: reports of outages from Rogers Mobility customers began pouring in from across the country.

The outage spread across services for cell phones, TV, and internet, with a big impact on the Interac payment system.

“We are so connected with all of the technology and all of the pieces from online orders right through to curbside pickup” says James Chambers, general manager of Chez Angela Bakery and Café in Brandon. “So even when part of the system fails like the Interac network, there’s always an immediate impact and then it smooths out throughout the day.”

The need to rely solely on credit cards through outages such as this has an effect on the business’ bottom line.

“Instead of paying 5 or 10 cents a tap, we’re paying 3.5 percent of the transaction,” Chambers says. “So for a small business, especially in these times, those kind of things are hard to swallow.”

Chambers says he appreciates the caring and supportive community for their understanding when it comes to these kinds of issues.

“This is the easy stuff to get over, certainly compared to closures, mandates, shut downs, things like that,” he says. “This one’s a smaller one and we’re gonna get through it.”

The outage also means calls for emergency services on Rogers devices won’t go through.

Brandon’s Enhanced 911 Call Centre provides dispatch services for seven police agencies and 192 fire departments throughout Manitoba. They typically get about 460 calls per day, with about 75 percent of calls coming from cell phones.

“About 40 percent of those usually come from Rogers specifically,” says Robert Stewart, director of Emergency Communications for the centre. “So in a day, we’re looking at about 160 or 170 specifically Rogers phone calls.”

Late this afternoon, Rogers tweeted an update saying they have “every technical resource and partner fully deployed to solve the problem”, they will share an update of “the specific time the Networks will be fully operational”, and they’ll be “proactively crediting all customers and will share more information soon.”