It was anything but business as usual for hundreds of thousands of Bell customers Wednesday morning.
Starting around 9 a.m., customers across Ontario, Quebec and parts of Atlantic Canada reported internet and cellular service outages, just as they were logging on for work or getting started with their day.
Nearly 140,000 Bell users across the country said they had experienced issues connecting to the internet or accessing their account at the peak of the outage just after 9:30 a.m., according to the site DownDetector. Of those reports, nearly 60 per cent were related to landline internet service, while approximately 10 per cent had an issue with mobile internet. Almost 30 per cent of customers reported a total blackout.
Over at the Graham Scott Legal Services office in Markham, founder and licensed paralegal Graham Scott said everything in the office came to a halt.
No one could send emails or get other work done on their computers. No one could call their clients either because cellular service was also down.
“I don’t remember a time when cell service was down or internet on my computer was down,” Scott told the Star Wednesday afternoon. “We were stuck.”
At first, Scott thought it was an issue with the office’s systems. But after 30 minutes of “technical testing” — and calling a friend on an old landline on his desk — he realized it wasn’t just his office that was struggling to get a connection.
Some people on social media said they tried calling Bell’s technical support line but weren’t able to complete the call.
“Some customers in Ontario and Quebec may be experiencing an internet and mobility service interruption,” Bell Canada wrote in a post on X shortly after reports of outages popped up on news sites and social media. “We are working to restore service as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.”
The connection at Scott’s office came back just after 10 a.m., and Bell Canada said full service restoration was completed an hour later.
The company told the Star the outage was caused by an update that was rolled out that affected some of their routers.
“We apologize for the inconvenience caused and thank customers for their patience,” the company wrote.
“We rolled back the update to quickly restore services. We want to assure our customers and partners that this was a technical issue and we have ruled out a cybersecurity incident as the root cause,” the company continued. “Our network teams are conducting a full review to ensure that this situation doesn’t happen again.”
Scott is happy the issue got resolved, but is left wondering how this happened.
“Why wasn’t that tested in advance,” he said.
The paralegal noted that he has floated the idea of putting two landlines — one from Bell and another from Rogers — in the office as a backup plan.
For Scott and others on social media, Wednesday’s Bell outage evoked memories of the 2022 Rogers outage that lasted more than 24 hours and left more than 12 million customers without internet and wireless access.
In July 2022, the federal government said it would require Canada’s telecom companies to reach formal agreements to provide mutual assistance to each other during outages.
A year later, in 2023, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced new temporary rules that required telecoms to report “major” outages impacting more than 100,000 customers to the regulator within two hours. Companies are also expected to file a “comprehensive” report on the causes of an outage and plans to avoid such issues in the future within two weeks.
Bell Canada did not say whether it had called on another telecom to provide backup coverage, or if it had filed a report with the CRTC, when asked by the Star.
