Impact of Rogers outage on Stampede was limited, but some headaches for business remain

Rogers' nationwide outage Friday led to massive headaches for retailers around Calgary on the first official day of the Stampede — and though most issues have since been resolved, some businesses are still tying off the loose ends.

Services were disrupted for more than two days, leading to mobile and internet outages across the country.

Rogers Communications has blamed the outage on a maintenance update that caused its routers to malfunction.

"Like many, the Stampede was impacted by the Rogers outage, mostly with our bank machines and point-of-sale machines in our venues and among our vendors," reads a statement from the Calgary Stampede.

Scooter Korek with North American Midway Entertainment said a senior member of the Stampede texted him on Friday first thing in the morning, telling him a nationwide outage was taking place.

"We tested some of our machines to find out that was actually the case, that we're going to have some issues," he said. "We jumped into action."

Korek said organizers replaced their debit machines with options running off an alternative to the Rogers system and utilized gift cards.

"By later that night, by say the close of the business day, we were pretty much back to normal," Korek said.

Operations at the grounds have since returned to normal. 

Of course, those looking to partake in Stampede activities often do so far outside the boundaries of the grounds. Busy bars and restaurants also found themselves having to juggle the impacts of the outage.

Ernie Tsu, owner of Calgary's Trolley 5 brewery-restaurant and president of the Alberta Hospitality Association, said the outage was a "nightmare" for businesses across the city.

"The largest common communication between all the members and between restaurants is this is evidence that we can't have one network controlling everything," Tsu said.

Tsu said staff at his 17th Avenue S.W. brewpub were spending Monday manually entering more than 800 transactions.

"For any of the cards that come back declined, we'll have to go through the bank and Rogers to see if we get these credits back against the bills that were not paid," Tsu said. "Yeah, it's tough, for sure. Especially on Day 1 of Stampede for Calgary."