Bell internet, mobile service restored in Ontario, Quebec following outage

Bell Canada says internet and mobile services have been restored following an outage that left some customers in Ontario and Quebec disconnected on Wednesday morning.

At its peak around 9:45 a.m. ET, more than 130,000 customers said they couldn’t connect using Bell, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages.

Shortly before 10 a.m., Bell confirmed some customers in Ontario and Quebec “may be experiencing an internet service interruption” and that they were working to fix the issue as quickly as possible. The company later said “mobility service” was also affected.

Bell said services were fully restored as of 11 a.m. ET.

In a post on X, Bell said the outage began after the company “conducted an update that impacted some of our routers … We rolled back the update to quickly restore services.”

“Customers who are still experiencing issues should reboot their modem by unplugging it and then plugging it back in after a couple of minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and thank customers for their patience,” the post further stated.

A Bell spokesperson told The Canadian Press network teams would conduct a full review to ensure this situation doesn’t happen again.

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.

With files from The Canadian Press