Updated May 21, 2025 @ 2:03pm
Bell says an hours-long outage that affected internet and cellular service for hundreds of thousands of customers across Ontario and Quebec on Wednesday morning was caused by a "technical issue."
The company said its services were fully restored by 11 a.m. after many users across both provinces began to notice the disruption around two hours earlier.
In a statement, Bell said the outage began after the company "conducted an update that impacted some of our routers."
"We would like to apologize for the disruption our customers experienced earlier today due to an internet outage," said spokeswoman Tianna Goguen in an emailed statement.
"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."
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Goguen said Bell's network teams would conduct a full review to ensure this situation doesn’t happen again.
According to Down Detector, a website that tracks outages, thousands of Bell customers started reporting issues just before 9:20 a.m.
Telus Corp. said some of its own customers were affected by the outage.
"Due to a Bell network disruption, some Telus customers in Eastern and Atlantic Canada experienced an internet and wireless outage this morning beginning around 9:30 a.m. ET. Services have been fully restored since 11 a.m. ET," said Tricia Lo, a Telus spokesperson, via email.
"Any customers who continue to experience connectivity issues are advised to reboot their devices."
In 2023, the CRTC directed all service providers to notify the regulator within two hours of when they become aware of a major outage.
That order was among a handful of interim measures the commission implemented as it launched a consultation with the aim of developing rules to improve network reliability and resiliency.
At the time, it also ordered carriers that have experienced a major outage to submit a report within two weeks outlining the cause of the disruption, steps taken to resolve it, how emergency and accessibility services were affected, and plans put in place to prevent a reoccurrence.
The CRTC cited the July 2022 Rogers outage — when millions of customers were in the dark for up to 15 hours — as one of the events prompting its consultation into how providers must report and notify customers when their services go down.
For its part, Rogers has sought to strengthen the resiliency of its networks since the outage, which was caused by a configuration error during a network upgrade, according to a report by Xona Partners Inc. delivered to the CRTC last year.
The company said it completed a full review of its networks and implemented all recommendations contained in the independent report.
About a month after the Rogers outage, Canada’s major telecom companies reached a formal agreement to “ensure and guarantee” mobile roaming and other mutual assistance in the case of a future major outage.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 21, 2025.
Companies in this story: (TSX:BCE)
