An explosion at the headquarters-building of Shaw Communications, one of Canada’s largest telcos, in downtown Calgary Wednesday continued to wreak havoc on the city into Friday afternoon, including cancellation of surgeries as a result of a hospital data center outage, residents’ inability to reach emergency or other city services and an outage of an IBM data center housed in the same building.

All services at the data center were disrupted by the fire, an IBM spokesperson told Calgary Herald. The data center is part of IBM’s three-story space in Shaw Court (the building) and provides outsourced IT services to many corporate and government clients.

One of the clients is Service Alberta, the surrounding province’s agency for motor-vehicle and land-title services, according to the Herald. Servers at the IBM data center process thousands of driver’s license renewals, vehicle registrations and land-title searches for the agency each day.

Homepage on the agency’s website said all motor-vehicle and land-title services were temporarily unavailable as of Friday afternoon PDT. Shaw Communications’ own website was down as well, returning only a simple page with updates on the incident.

Perhaps the most painful impact of the outage was on Alberta Health Services (AHS) and many of its patients. More than 100 elective surgeries and about 300 ambulatory procedures were cancelled Friday because the province’s health authority’s computer system was down, the Herald said.

The AHS data center did come back up on Friday, but technicians continued bringing hardware systems back online.

“Applications are being brought online in terms of the highest clinical priorities and systems are being checked as they are brought back to ensure data integrity,” AHS Calgary zone medical director Francois Belanger said during a news conference. “This will take several hours, but we are back on track.”

Some residents could not call 911 using land lines as a result of a communications-network outage, Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi Tweeted Wednesday.

“Some Shaw landline customers in downtown Calgary cannot access 911 right now,” Nenshi wrote. “Use your cellphone to call 911 in case of emergency.”

Shaw said only a small number of customers whose phone service was down were unable to reach 911. By noon local time Wednesday, the company had restored services to most of its customers, Shaw wrote in an update on its website.

The outage was caused by a transformer explosion in the building.

While Shaw has a lot of redundancy on its national network, the fire affected generators in the building. “Due to the nature of this flash fire our generators and back-up generators were both impacted in an unforeseen manner,” the company said.