Telus outage impacts critical phone services across the Okanagan

A Telus network and cellular outage impacted critical phone services across the Okanagan Thursday night into Friday morning.

According to a brief emailed statement, BC RCMP said the issue happened during Telus’ scheduled maintenance work on their fibre network.

“While not expected, the outage has impacted all communities in the South East District (SED) and Daajing Giids, Smithers and New Aiyansh in the North District (ND) when calling their local RCMP detachments,” read the BC RCMP statement.

“While members of the public can call the RCMP, all calls are being re-routed to Prince George in the ND.”

2:43 Interior Health responds to growing safety concerns

The outage also impacted BC Emergency Health Services and triggered a code grey at multiple Interior Health (IH) locations including at the Penticton Regional Hospital.

A Code Grey is an emergency designation that IH uses following a system failure that has jeopardized health care operations or service delivery. This signals the need for immediate attention.

“As a result of a Telus outage, Interior Health responded with a code grey at multiple sites across the region at approximately 11:15 p.m. on March 21,” read an Interior Health statement. “IH has existing protocols in place to manage such an event. Critical and inpatient care services continued to be delivered at sites that were impacted.”

The outage follows a similar situation at the Kelowna General Hospital (KGH) only three weeks ago, when the entire computer system went down. Staff at that time could not access patient files digitally.

And KGH’s code grey happened on the same night as a code orange involving a mass casualty situation. Staff working in emergency that night told Global News it made for a ‘potentially dangerous situation’.

“The code grey issued on February 28, was specific to an IT service disruption and these two events are unrelated,” said Interior Health. “The code grey issued on March 21 was an entirely different issue due to a Telus core network and cellular service disruption.”

2:23 Review underway after hospital codes issued simultaneously

While in Penticton’s case the code grey wasn’t as challenging and only impacted phone services, it prompts the question: What is the contingency plan should critical infrastructure fail again?

The health authority had promised a review into the situation that unfolded at KGH but did not respond to our request for a review update in their statement.

“While these are challenging circumstances,  emergency response planning stands as a key priority for Interior Health, with ongoing staff training and regular updates to our emergency plans, enabling us to effectively address a range of emergency events to sustain health services,” said Interior Health. “We want to thank the Interior Health staff who acted quickly in response to the TELUS outage to provide continuity of service and care to patients.”

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