Overview
- Bell detected a problem in its next‑generation 9‑1‑1 network on Thursday morning and said service was restored about an hour later after routing fixes were applied.
- The outage disrupted emergency calling across multiple provinces including Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and several Atlantic provinces and prompted police to tell people to use non‑emergency lines or landlines if 9‑1‑1 would not connect.
- Bell and emergency centres used backup systems such as SafetyNet to reroute most calls while Toronto Police used RapidSOS to keep visibility of incoming emergencies and return callers for assistance.
- Company spokespeople said the incident is under investigation, that there is no indication it was caused by a cyberattack, and that intermittent issues may have briefly lingered after service was restored.
- The CRTC received Bell’s initial outage notice and will publish a summary after Bell files a detailed post‑outage report that must explain root causes, corrective steps and measures to prevent future failures.