911 service restored across Canada as Bell probes intermittent outages
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TORONTO – Emergency lines have been restored after an early morning outage interrupted 911 networks across several Canadian provinces, including Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia.
Bell said an issue with its digital 911 network was detected around 3:13 a.m. Thursday and service was restored at 4:40 a.m. EDT.
The communications company, which provides 911 services in Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada, said backup systems were brought online to route calls to emergency services as technicians investigated the outage.
“The vast majority of calls coming from Bell customers were immediately picked up by the “SafetyNet” system and rerouted to the destination Public Safety Answering Points,” the company said in a statement.
“We continue to investigate the root cause of the issue. This issue was not triggered by a cyber attack,” spokesperson Elise von Scheel wrote.
Several police services across Canada reported that their 911 lines were down Thursday morning, though the outages appeared to be resolved within an hour or two in many cases.
Police services including those in Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, London, Ont., and Waterloo, Ont., reported the disruptions on social media, urging residents to call non-emergency lines instead.
Ontario Provincial Police also said they were alerted to intermittent 911 outages in the province, with the first reports coming in around 4 a.m.
“While the 911 system appears to be largely restored, it is possible that intermittent disruptions may still exist,” the OPP said in a statement.
It urged those who still can’t reach 911 to call the OPP non-emergency line at 1-888-310-1122.
The Surete du Quebec said technical issues were affecting the transfer of certain 911 calls in that province.
A spokesperson for Montreal police said earlier Thursday that even if 911 calls came in during the outage, there was a possibility they would be transferred to police services elsewhere in the country.
Further east, the Nova Scotia government said intermittent 911 outages affected some cellphone and VoIP users, while police in Saint John, N.B., said 911 was down on cellphones but still available from landlines.
“The province is working to understand the full extent of the service disruption,” the Nova Scotia government said in a statement.
A widespread Rogers Communications outage in July 2022 left many unable to call 911 and knocked out mobile, landline and internet service to millions of customers across Canada.
The company later said it was unable to switch customers to competing carriers during the unprecedented service outage, despite offers of assistance from Bell and Telus.
Rogers said in a submission to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission it was also unable to shut down its radio access network, which would have automatically connected customers to another carrier for 911 calls.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2026.