The bending load is highest at the joint and zero at the edge
A rib is a beam held at one end, and the load on a beam like that is not spread evenly. It is greatest where the beam is held — at the joint, or at the hub — and it falls to nothing at the free end, which is the tip out at the canopy edge. That single fact decides whether a break can be repaired. Snap a rib in its outer third, near the edge, and the two halves are asked to carry almost no bending; a splint holds that easily. Snap it at the joint and the break sits exactly where the load peaks, on a part that flexes every time you open the umbrella, and nothing short of a new rib will survive.
So the test is not how many ribs broke, it is where along the rib. Run a finger from the canopy edge inwards until you find the break. In the outer third — roughly the last 10 cm — it is repairable. Within about a third of the shaft, at or near the joint where the short stretcher meets the rib, it is not, and that is a rib or an umbrella, not a repair.
Why glue always fails
Because a rib does not get pulled, it gets bent. Cyanoacrylate — superglue — is a brittle adhesive: it has decent shear strength and almost no tolerance for bending or impact, and on smooth fibreglass or stainless it barely bonds at all. A joint that flexes a hundred times per journey will crack the glue line within a day or two. And the failure is worse than the original: the glue has filled the fibres, so the new break happens just beside the old one, where the material is contaminated and the two ends are now shorter and harder to splice.
What works is mechanical, not chemical. Two rigid strips — bamboo skewers, a lolly stick cut in half, a strip of stiff plastic — laid along opposite sides of the break and bound with tape over at least 3 cm either side of it. The strength comes from the contact area and the constraint, not from adhesion, which is why this holds where glue does not. A short length of heat-shrink tube over the break does the same job more neatly if you have some and a hairdryer. Either way the repair lives on the outside of the rib, where it can carry the bend.
Then replace the rib — or decide not to
If you want it properly fixed, the rib has to be replaced, and that means matching three things: length, gauge and joint spacing. Length is obvious, gauge is the diameter (roughly 2.5–3.5 mm on most), and joint spacing is where the little pivot hole sits — get that wrong and the rib cannot be pinned. Take the broken one out first and measure it. Most canopies have a rib sleeve: the rib slides through a stitched channel and its end is held by a small cap in a hole at the canopy edge. Pull the cap, slide the rib out, slide the new one in, refit the cap, and pin the joint. Do not cut the canopy open; a stitched seam can be unpicked, but a cut in the cloth cannot be un-cut.
Then do the arithmetic honestly. A rib is five to thirty, and the first one takes an hour including finding the right size. On a forty-dollar umbrella that is a bad trade; on a two-hundred-dollar storm umbrella with a good canopy it is an obvious one. The dividing line is not the price of the rib, it is whether the canopy and the frame are worth an hour of your evening.
The shaft is a different question
A bent shaft is not a rib. Steel bends and then work-hardens at the bend — the metal there becomes harder and less ductile, so straightening it once may work, and straightening it twice will snap it at exactly the same place. Aluminium is worse: it work-hardens faster and takes less bending before it cracks. So if the shaft is kinked, the umbrella is finished as a structural object, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than spending an evening on it.