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Manitoba businesses and festivals hurt by Rogers outage

Click to play video: 'Canadians outraged over Rogers outage'
Canadians outraged over Rogers outage
Service has been restored for the majority of Rogers customers, but the impact will still be felt for days and weeks to come. Tech expert Andy Baryer spoke to Emily Lazatin about why it signals the need for more competition in the telecommunications industry – Jul 9, 2022

It’s hard to find someone who wasn’t impacted by the Rogers outage on Friday, including chef Ben Kramer, who is feeding thousands of volunteers at Winnipeg’s Folk Festival.

When one of his fridge trucks went down at folk fest, he tried to call for a repair man, but, due to the outage, he could only get support via email.

“They ended up sending out a tech support around midnight… it was very difficult to get them into the park,” said Kramer.

Inside city limits, businesses struggled with Interac machines going down.

Harrisons coffee owner Al Dawson says he decided customer’s wouldn’t go without their caffeine kick.

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“If someone only had debit and they were regular we took care of them,” said Dawson.

An ATM outside of the London, Ont., Public Library that is “temporarily out of service” due to the ongoing Rogers internet, phone and Interac outages on Friday, July 8, 2022. Andrew Graham / Global News London

Dawson says overall, he and his team made the best of an unfortunate situation.

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Jason Chambers, owner of from Chez Angela in Brandon, says his operation did the same.

“We’re we’re post-pandemic…we can survive anything now,” said Chambers.

Chambers says cash sales went up, but credit cards were the main form of payment and the biggest hit to his finances will be those slightly higher credit card machine fees.

“When you compute that over hundreds of transactions throughout the day there is a significant impact,” he said.

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Tony Staffieri, the executive director of Rogers Communications, said in a statement that the disruption was caused by a network system failure following a maintenance update in the telecom giant’s core network, which caused some routers to malfunction.

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