An update that impacted some of Bell’s routers caused an internet outage on Wednesday morning that reportedly left tens of thousands of Canadians without service.
As of 12:30 p.m. Eastern, slightly more than 1,445 people were still reporting outages to DownDetector with the majority focused around landline internet. However, that number had topped nearly 140,000 at about 9:30 a.m.
In a statement to Global News, a spokesperson said services had been fully restored as of 11 a.m.
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“Bell conducted an update that impacted some of our routers. We rolled back the update to quickly restore services,” the spokesperson wrote. “We would like to apologize for the disruption our customers experienced earlier today due to an internet outage.”
The company said if customers are still experiencing issues, they’re advised to reboot their modem by unplugging then plugging it back in after a couple of minutes.
The company also told Global News that it was a technical issue and it has ruled out a cybersecurity incident as the root cause, though the network teams are conducting a full review to ensure the situation doesn’t happen again.
Earlier in the day, the company said people in Ontario and Quebec had been impacted, though it has not said how many customers were affected.
DownDetector reports also showed users saying they had encountered issues using Bell services in the Maritimes.
Numbers were also dropping after smaller outages were reported on DownDetector for various other service providers including Virgin Mobile, Telus, Cogeco, Rogers and Eastlink.
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