Bell Canada restores internet service after outage hits users in Quebec, Ontario

Bell Canada said on Wednesday it had rolled back an update and restored internet services after a nearly two-hour outage hit tens of thousands of customers in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario.

The update impacted some of Bell's routers, the BCE unit said, adding that the services had been "fully restored" as of 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 response.


The company said its network teams were conducting a full review to prevent an outage from occurring again. Bell has 4.4 million retail high-speed internet subscribers, according to its first-quarter shareholder report.

The outage started around 9 a.m. ET and triggered more than 130,000 disruption reports at its peak, according to tracking website Downdetector.com.

Downdetector tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted reports. The actual number of affected users may vary.

Bell Canada advised its users "who are still experiencing issues" to reboot the modem, according to a post on its Facebook page.