Toronto, Canada – Bell Canada has confirmed the full restoration of its internet and mobile services after a significant outage left more than 130,000 customers across Ontario and Quebec disconnected on Wednesday morning.
At its peak around 9:45 a.m. ET, the widespread disruption affected a substantial portion of Bell’s customer base, according to Downdetector, a website that monitors service outages. Shortly before 10 a.m., Bell acknowledged that some customers in the two provinces “may be experiencing an internet service interruption” and assured the public that they were working to resolve the issue with urgency. The company later confirmed that “mobility service” was also impacted by the disruption.
Bell announced that services were fully restored by 11 a.m. ET. In a post on X, the telecommunications giant explained that the outage was triggered after the company “conducted an update that impacted some of our routers.” Bell promptly initiated a rollback of the update to “quickly restore services.” The company advised any remaining customers experiencing issues to reboot their modems by unplugging them and then reconnecting after a few minutes, while apologising for the inconvenience caused and thanking customers for their patience.
A Bell spokesperson informed The Canadian Press that network teams would conduct a comprehensive review to prevent a recurrence of the situation. This incident follows a 2023 directive from the CRTC, which mandated all service providers to notify the regulator within two hours of becoming aware of a major outage. That order was part of a series of interim measures implemented by the commission as it launched a broader consultation aimed at developing new regulations to enhance network reliability and resiliency across Canada.
