Bell says Wednesday morning service outages were caused by an update

Bell says its services have been fully restored after a major disruption to thousands of users across Ontario and Quebec.

According to the company, the cause was “an update that impacted some of our routers.”

Shortly after 9 a.m., reports of outages at several Canadian service providers spiked – with over 130,000 reports on Downdetector by 10 a.m.

The company said its services were fully restored by 11 a.m.

“This was not a cyber-attack, or a solar storm,” said Carmi Levy, a tech expert. “This was, according to Bell, an update that affected some of their routers [where] they rolled out an update to software – obviously it did not go well.”

Bell received more than 130,000 complaints in the morning about service being down.

“The vast majority of reports came in from Ontario and Quebec – there were other reports from across the country, but they weren’t related to this failure,” said Levy. “In some cases, users were moving to other forms of connectivity if their service at home wasn’t working. They were putting huge loads on the wireless networks.”

In July 2022, Rogers had a similar outage when millions of customers were in the dark for up to 15 hours.

That outage was caused by a configuration error during a network upgrade.

Wednesday morning’s outage prompted the Durham Regional Police Department to post on social media that their 911 Centre was experiencing an increase in calls, and asked that people not call 9-1-1 to test their cellphones.

Levy said this is a prime example of just how dependent people have become on internet-connected devices, and services in our day-to-day lives.

“Thankfully these kinds of mass outages don’t happen very often,” said Levy. “It’s a reminder we need to plan for that eventually every carrier will have some kind of outage – you need to have a how-to, what you’re going to do in case that happens.”

Some banking systems may also be affected. According to Downdetector, hundreds of Scotiabank users have reported outages in the last 24 hours.

A Bell spokesperson said network teams would conduct a full review to ensure this situation doesn’t happen again.

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