911 service resumes after early-morning outages across Canada

Police services across Canada reported 911 outages Thursday morning, with many saying service appeared to be restored within one or two hours. Police in Toronto, Ottawa, London and Waterloo, Ont., urged residents on social media to use non-emergency lines if they could not reach 911 during an emergency.

Bell told CityNews that an issue affected its core next-generation 911 network at about 3:13 a.m. ET and that service was restored at 4:40 a.m. ET. The company said the SafetyNet system immediately picked up and rerouted the vast majority of calls from Bell customers to the appropriate public safety answering points. Bell said it is investigating the cause.

Ontario Provincial Police said they were alerted to intermittent outages in parts of the province. While the system has mostly been restored, the force said intermittent disruptions may still occur. People unable to reach OPP by dialling 911 should call its non-emergency line at 1-888-310-1122, and should not call 911 to test the system.

Quebec's provincial police said technical problems affected the transfer of some 911 calls. A Montreal police spokesperson said the outage affected the telephone carrier responsible for 911, meaning calls that connected could have been transferred to police services elsewhere in Canada. Nova Scotia said some cellphone and VoIP users could be affected by intermittent outages linked to telecommunications carrier networks rather than the provincial 911 system. Police in Saint John, N.B., said 911 was unavailable from cellphones but remained available from landlines.

Rural communities in Winnipeg experienced several hours of 911 outages in July. Bell said then that a third party doing construction had cut a fibre cable and that its backup system, which is intended to reroute 911 calls during an outage, was also experiencing issues in that rare incident.