Horrible service during power outage

Hi,

This past friday my neighbourhood got hit by a thunderstorm. Nothing unexpected during a summer heat wave.  During that storm we lost power at my house.  This outage lasted about 7 hours.  The Question I have is that as soon as the power went out (6:21 pm), I lost all data on all my devices (both my wife's phone and mine).  While I still had service, and I could make a voice call anything else was questinoable. Text messages were hit and miss if people got them, MMS messages did not go and we most certainly couldn't use any true data.  We also rebooted both devcies several times.

I can understand that under an extended outage service could be impacted (tower batteries die etc etc), but to loose all data instantly is something I've never experienced before with any of my other carriers.  For what it's worth I'm in Barrhaven Ontario (a Suburb of Ottawa) and the phones were reporting that they were on Videotron not a partner network.  While internet is not a critical part of life, it tends to be the go to option for getting updates on power outages and bad weather status's.

Can someone explain to me the cuase of this ? and is this something I can expect as normal operation with Videotron ?

Tks, 

Dave