Many of Rogers Communications’s services went down early Friday. Here’s a look at the widespread impact:

What happened: Data published by internet-security firm Cloudflare shows traffic from Rogers falling to near zero at about 5 a.m. ET and the telco has not said why. Rogers’s support account on Twitter first acknowledged the “issues” four hours into the outage and a similarly vague posting to a Rogers forum on its services’ status followed.

The effects: Individual Rogers customers were cut off from internet services. Internet and wireless resellers like TekSavvy went down. Some of the federal government’s Service Canada offices and call centres couldn’t function. Transit services had trouble. The registry for organ transplants stopped working. Even the CRTC, the national telecom regulator, couldn’t take calls.

In Quebec, the Montreal Comiccon opened with vendors struggling to take customers’ money.

“Shopify Payments is just straight-up not working for me. When I open the Shopify POS app, it can’t connect to the server,” said Aaron Reynolds, the internet-famous creator of the comic “Effin’ Birds,” by Telus phone. He’s at the convention selling merchandise, which makes up about a third of his income. 

“My Moneris terminal is fine. It has successfully done one debit transaction, and failed for four or five debit transactions. But every credit-card transaction has gone through fine.”

Vendors who rely entirely on Square, or who connect their sales terminals to the world through Rogers hotspots (or Rogers’s discount Fido brand), were out of luck, he said.

“A lot of people are horse-trading with the people at the table next to them,” Reynolds said, describing how one vendor with a working terminal ran electronic sales for both tables with the promise to pay out the neighbour at the end of the day.

Most of the ATMs on the convention floor were out, too, he said.

“Apparently it was much worse at the metro stations. Everybody’s having trouble getting on trains,” Reynolds said.

The costs: The U.K.-based NetBlocks, which advocates for “open, secure and reliable connectivity” has an online tool for estimating the costs of internet outages that pegs the impact of a total shutdown of the internet in Canada at about $718 million a day. With Rogers accounting for a quarter of the Canadian internet, NetBlocks director Alp Toker told The Logic it’s fair to estimate a full day of outages will cost at least $180 million.

The political reaction: Innovation Minister François-Philippe Champagne, who oversees the telecom industry, released a statement saying Rogers’s services are important. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner wrote that a committee hearing might be useful and called for “swift action.”

The federal Liberals have a bill that would require companies like Rogers to have government-supervised plans to protect against cyber attacks. Champagne’s office could not immediately say whether he would see value in similar oversight of telcos’ plans for responding to other mass outages.