Bell Canada Restores Internet Service After Two-Hour Outage in Quebec and Ontario
Bell Canada announced on Wednesday that it has fully restored internet services after a technical update issue caused a significant two-hour outage affecting tens of thousands of users in Quebec and Ontario.
The disruption, which began around 9:00 a.m. ET, peaked with more than 130,000 disruption reports, according to real-time outage tracker Downdetector.com. Bell confirmed that service had been completely restored by 11:00 a.m. ET.
“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,” Bell said in an emailed statement.
Cause and Response
The outage stemmed from a software update that affected some of Bell’s router infrastructure. The company responded by rolling back the update, which resolved the issue.
Bell, a unit of BCE Inc., said its network teams are conducting a full review to prevent future disruptions.
Customer Impact and Instructions
Bell serves approximately 4.4 million high-speed internet subscribers, as noted in its latest quarterly report. The full scale of the outage remains unclear, but many users in eastern Canada reported service disruptions throughout the morning.
For customers still experiencing issues, Bell advised a modem reboot via a notice on its Facebook page.
