TORONTO -- Restaurants using Uber Eats in Ontario over the weekend say they experienced outages that left them unable to deliver meals to customers.

They say shutdowns to the delivery service lasted hours and caused massive drops in sales because they couldn't get orders out.

The owner of Hanmoto, Seoul Shakers and Pinky's Ca Phe restaurants in Toronto says he had up to 50 orders at a time waiting for Uber Eats drivers that rarely showed and his UberEats app repeatedly told him the service was offline.

Craig's Cookies owner Craig Pike estimates his business lost around $9,000 from the outage and has caused him to switch to doing deliveries through Uber Eats competitor DoorDash instead.

Uber Eats did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but used Twitter to tell some users they were reviewing the issue.

The outage came as restaurants across Canada have had to close amid COVID-19, pushing them to rely on delivery services.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 27, 2020.