A widespread internet outage left some Bell customers without service on Wednesday morning.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Some telecom customers in Ontario and Quebec experienced an outage Wednesday morning after Bell Canada conducted an update that affected a number of its routers.
Bell, which is owned by BCE Inc. BCE-T, said the service interruption was resolved as of 11 a.m. after the company rolled back the update.
“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,” spokesperson Ellen Murphy said in an e-mailed statement.
“Our network teams are conducting a full review to ensure that this situation doesn’t happen again. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and thank customers for their patience.”
The outage also affected wholesale internet providers that use Bell’s network, as well as some cellphone towers, leaving some Bell and Telus T-T customers unable to make calls, send texts or access mobile data. (Bell and Telus share portions of their wireless networks.)
The impact on cellphone service was “smaller in scope” than the internet outage, said Ms. Murphy, who noted that other providers who roam on Bell’s wireless network may have also been affected.
Telus said some of its customers in Eastern and Atlantic Canada experienced an internet and wireless service outage starting around 9:30 a.m. as a result of Bell’s network disruption. Services had been fully restored by 11 a.m., Telus spokesperson Richard Gilhooley said in a statement.
“Any customers who continue to experience connectivity issues are advised to reboot their devices,” Mr. Gilhooley said.
Rogers Communications Inc. RCI-B-T said there was no impact to its network.
The website Downdetector showed a surge of outage reports from users on Wednesday morning, with more than 130,000 complaints made, mostly by Bell customers. By 10:45 a.m., the volume of reports had fallen to fewer than 5,000.
In July, 2022, the federal government directed Canadian telecoms to enter into a formal agreement aimed at enhancing network reliability. The directive was a response to a massive outage caused by a coding error that left millions of Rogers customers without cellphone, internet or home phone service for at least a day.
That September, 12 of Canada’s telephone and internet service providers signed an agreement to share network services in the case of a major service interruption.
The agreement also includes a communications protocol that requires the telecoms to provide timely information about outages to the public and to government authorities.