No critical incidents, adverse public safety events resulted from July 911 outage, Bell says in report to CRTC

The telecommunications outage that prevented Manitobans outside Winnipeg from contacting 911 for several hours last month did not result in “critical incidents or adverse public safety outcomes,” Bell Canada says.

Bell, which runs Manitoba’s 911 network, issued its post-incident report on the July 22 outage to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission on Thursday.

In total, calls to 911 made by 84 people from 11:40 a.m. to 3:25 p.m. could not be routed to the public safety call centre in Brandon. That facility answers 911 calls for most of the province outside Winnipeg.

Officials at the 911 call centre in Brandon advised Bell that, as of Thursday, there had been no reported critical incidents or public-safety issues as a result of the missed calls, the telecom company said in its report.

The Brandon centre was able to identify the missed calls, associated locations and callback numbers in real time, so staff promptly followed up with the affected callers, Bell said.

“Bell takes its role as the provider of 9-1-1 network services in Manitoba with the utmost seriousness, and has approached this incident accordingly,” wrote Philippe Gauvin, Bell’s assistant general counsel, in the report.

The outage resulted from two concurrent, independent infrastructure failures, the company said.

One of the infrastructure failures appears to have been a fibre-optic line cut in Winnipeg by road construction crews. The specifics of the other are redacted from the publicly available report.

Bell said it then failed to automatically recognize the two failures in a way that would trigger 911 call routing to default call centres as a backup.

The unspecified failure occurred on July 21 and had reduced redundancy for the Brandon centre, but had not yet affected service, the report said.

Technicians were working to replace the failed, unspecified piece of infrastructure the following morning, but had not yet finished when the fibre-optic line was cut in Winnipeg at about 11:40 a.m.

“The fibre cut removed the sole remaining transport path… resulting in a complete loss of 911 call delivery to Brandon,” according to the report.

Bell’s operations teams “immediately” began investigating and working on restoring service, the provider said.

One team continued the replacement process for the unspecified piece of infrastructure, another investigated and repaired the fibre-optic cut and a third investigated why calls were not flowing to default call centres.

At about 2:30 p.m. that day, Bell manually forced an error code to the originating network providers people were using when they tried to call 911 to trigger those company’s third-party default call centre solutions, Bell said.

That is supposed to happen automatically, the report said, but did not. The reason why it was not triggered is redacted from the report.

Service at the Brandon 911 centre was restored at about 3:25 p.m., after the unspecified piece of infrastructure was replaced. The cut fibre-optic line was repaired just before 10 p.m.

In June, Bell said Manitoba will be ready to switch to a modern, next generation 911 network by the end of the year.

All emergency call centres must be ready to provide next-generation 911 voice and text messaging services by the end of March 2027, as directed by the CRTC.

In its report, Bell said the July outage and another Manitoba 911 outage earlier this year were the result of “legacy limitations” in the existing system that will be eliminated once the new system is fully adopted.

But in the short term, Bell said, it has added two additional routes for calls to be transported to the centre, for a total of four. It has also enhanced how calls are automatically rerouted if the 911 platform fails.

The telecom said its team has discussed the report with officials at the Brandon 911 centre and the provincial government and will continue to do so.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca