Bell says services fully restored after widespread outage hit Ontario, Quebec

After users in Ontario and Quebec reported a widespread outage of Bell Canada's services this morning, the company said an update triggered the interruption and that it had since fully restored its system.

"Bell conducted an update that impacted some of our routers. We rolled back the update to quickly restore services," a spokesperson for the company told CBC News. "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."

"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."

Data from DownDetector, an outage tracker, showed that complaints spiked around 9:30 a.m. ET, with more than 133,000 reports made. Most of the reports cited issues with landline and mobile internet connections.

By 12:15 p.m. ET, that number had flattened to fewer than 1,500 complaints. By mid-afternoon, some users said they were still experiencing an outage.

"When an update goes wrong, there is a ripple effect that happens," said Ritesh Kotak, a technology expert based in Toronto.

"That's most likely what happened here. One bad update caused a chain reaction of other switches and routers to shut down," he said, adding that it sometimes takes a while to turn the system back on so as not to trigger further damage.

Telecoms pledged changes after 2022 Rogers outage

Bell Canada initially acknowledged in a message on its Facebook page this morning that "some customers in Ontario and Quebec may be experiencing an internet service interruption."

"We are working to restore service as quickly as possible," the statement said. "Thank you for your patience."

The company shared an update on social media at 11:30 a.m. ET, acknowledging that some customers were also having issues with mobile service.

The DownDetector map shows that some outages are being reported across Atlantic Canada. Bell Aliant, a subsidiary that operates in the Atlantic provinces, doesn't appear to be having the same issues as the wider network.

After a massive Rogers outage left 12 million people without internet service in 2022, Canada's telecom regulator set new rules requiring companies to report major outages and interruptions within two hours. 

More than a dozen Canadian telecoms — including Bell, Rogers and Telus — signed a memorandum of understanding that year, pledging to work together to provide emergency roaming, mutual assistance and communications with the public and the government during an outage or other "impactful disaster."