Some small businesses, hospitals and residents of Waterloo Region are still feeling the lingering effects of the Rogers outage.
For Toyko Smoke in Waterloo’s Bridgeport Plaza, service was still spotty and slow on Saturday, July 9.
“It was a complete write-off yesterday,” manager Nick Miller said. “Some transactions [today]What are typically five seconds of transactions in a POS system can take up to five minutes.”
The store was closed all day Friday due to the outage and lost about $4,000 in sales.
“People who order online, we couldn’t even 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 going offline,” McQueen said Friday. “There are ways we can get around it, but it’s pretty significant how much it’s affected a business.”
Experts have warned that in the midst of the disruption, technology used in healthcare has been put at risk.
“It’s important to know that it’s not just cell phones and computers, but everything that’s connected to Rogers’ infrastructure,” said cybersecurity and technology consultant Ritesh Kotak. “You’ve got VOIP lines, you’ve got medical equipment in some cases that might have Rogers’ SIM card attached to it.”
The Ottawa-based Center for Public Interest Advocacy is now asking the Canadian Telecommunications Regulator (CRTC) to conduct an open investigation into yesterday’s debacle.
SEVERAL LONG-TERM EFFECTS FOR LOCAL HOSPITALS
Although no major equipment damage was reported at Waterloo-area hospitals on Friday, officials at St. Mary’s say some communication problems were still ongoing Saturday.
A Cambridge Memorial Hospital spokesman says their wireless and landline connections were offline, adding to the challenges the over-capacity and understaffed hospital faces, such as emergency room wait times.
They add that they don’t expect the challenges to improve in the short term, but that patients in the emergency department will receive priority care.
Meanwhile, officials at Grand River Hospital say they have seen some delays in discharging patients and have been unable to contact family members as well as partners in the health system who have been affected by the outage.
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