Bell Canada says it has fully restored its internet and cell services after hundreds of thousands of customers reported issues Wednesday morning.
Customers began reporting an outage around 9 a.m. and it lasted for approximately two hours, with full service restoration completed as of 11 a.m., the company said shortly after noon.Â
Bell attributed the outage to an update that was rolled out and subsequently affected some of their routers.
“We apologize for the inconvenience caused and thank customers for their patience,” the company told the Star in a statement.Â
“We rolled back the update to quickly restore services. 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,” the company continue. “Our network teams are conducting a full review to ensure that this situation doesn’t happen again.”Â
Nearly 390,000 users across the country said they had experienced issues connecting to the internet or accessing their account as of 12:30 p.m., according to the site . Of those reports, nearly 60 per cent were related to landline internet service, approximately 10 per cent had an issue with mobile internet and almost 30 per cent of customers reported a total blackout.
The majority of issues were reported in Ontario, Quebec and parts of Eastern Canada according to a map published by the site DownDetector.
Screenshot from DownDetector“Some customers in Ontario and Quebec may be experiencing an internet and mobility service interruption,”  earlier in the morning. “We are working to restore service as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.”Â
Some customers in Ontario and Quebec may be experiencing an Internet and Mobility service interruption. We are working to restore service as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience.
— Bell Support (@Bell_Support)
Some customers took to and said they were receiving “Error 2000,” which is triggered when a modem is unable to connect to Bell’s servers.
Some affected users said they tried calling Bell’s technical support line but weren’t able to complete the call.Â
People need a timeline of when this will be fixed! Will it take a few hours or a few days!!! Provide people with an estimated timeline! Why are the phones down too!!!
— Maverick Power Entertainment (@JasonRMaverick)
On X, some customers were complaining about how they felt their internet bills kept increasing with no service improvement.
“The more expensive it gets, the worse it works. What are these price increases going towards?” .
A customer, who says he works as an online streamer, him for the work he was missing because of the outage. is planning on compensating affected clients.
By 10 a.m. their internet had been restored while others continued to report issues with their service.
911 centres in the area were experiencing an increase in the number of calls and were asking people not to call emergency numbers to test if their phone is working.Â
In July 2022, the federal government said it would require Canada’s telecom companies to reach formal agreements to provide mutual assistance to each other during outages. The move followed a daylong and widespread Rogers outage that knocked out internet and mobile networks for more than 12 million customers.Â
With files from Nathan BawaanÂ
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