A previously undetected flaw in Bell Canada’s software caused the 911 outage that hit six provinces in September, the company has told the federal telecom regulator, and warning alarms that went off early in the incident did not trigger an emergency response.
Bell’s post-outage report to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), reported by CBC News, says the outage began at 3:13 a.m. ET on Sept. 17 and lasted about 87 minutes, until service was restored at 4:40 a.m. It affected Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.
The bug sat in Bell’s next-generation 911 system, known as NG9-1-1, the internet-based network that is replacing Canada’s older 911 infrastructure. “This incident was not a cyber attack and did not result from any change activity,” Philippe Gauvin, Bell’s assistant general counsel, wrote in the report, meaning no planned or unplanned system change set it off.
Bell said the “vast majority” of calls during the disruption were picked up by backup systems. The calls that failed were older-style “legacy” voice calls headed to 911 call centres that had already switched to the new technology. Bell did not say how many calls were missed, according to the report.
The most troubling detail is about response time. According to the report, two alarms fired at 3:13 and 3:19 a.m., but neither launched Bell’s crisis process. Engineers were only alerted when a separate alarm flagged an unusual drop in call volume about 24 minutes later. Bell said it put a permanent fix in place later that morning and described the incident as the first of its kind since the system launched in early 2022.
That framing deserves context. This was not the only Bell 911 failure this year. CBC reported this summer that 84 people could not reach 911 during a separate outage that affected most of Manitoba, citing Bell. There is no indication the two incidents are linked, but for people who could not get through, the result was the same.
The timing also matters because Canada is in the middle of a forced switch. The CRTC has set March 31, 2027, as the deadline for moving every 911 call centre to NG9-1-1, after pushing the date back from March 2025 at the request of provinces and emergency services that were not ready. After that, only next-generation calls will be delivered. The regulator has warned that call centres that miss the deadline must make other arrangements, because the old networks will be shut down.
In other words, the hybrid period, when old and new systems run side by side, is exactly when this kind of mismatch can happen, and it will continue for another six months. The new system promises real benefits, including real-time text with 911 and more precise caller location. But it also concentrates more of the country’s emergency calling on fewer, more complex networks.
The open questions are ones the report does not answer: how many people could not reach help on Sept. 17, why two early alarms did not escalate, and whether the CRTC will order changes to alarm handling or require public reporting of missed calls. Under CRTC rules, carriers must notify the regulator of outages and file a report within 14 days explaining the cause, the fix and how they will prevent a repeat.
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Sources: via CBC News; CRTC Telecom Decision 2025-67; CBC Manitoba. Featured image: file photo of an ambulance (Unsplash), not connected to the outage.
