TORONTO — Ontario’s 911 system went dark in the small hours Thursday after Bell detected a fault on the next-generation 911 network at about 3:13 a.m., leaving police, fire and ambulance lines intermittent from Windsor to Ottawa while technicians scrambled backup routing.Toronto police posted at 4:30 a.m. that the emergency line could not receive calls and told residents to use 416-808-2222 or walk into a division. Service in the city was down for more than an hour and a half before TPS said around 6:20 a.m. that 911 was coming back. York Regional Police reported about 16 minutes of disruption; Windsor said it was back at 5:21 a.m.; London at 4:52 a.m.; Waterloo at 6:22 a.m.; Hamilton said lines were down about an hour from 3:30 a.m. Peel, Durham and Niagara posted the same warning.The Ontario Provincial Police said it had reports of intermittent outages “in parts of the province” and told the public to call 1-888-310-1122 if 911 would not connect. OPP members kept answering calls for service, police said, and asked people not to test the line. Kingston, Ottawa and London issued the same instruction. A Toronto paramedic spokesperson told CBC News Bell’s 911 service was down across Ontario and that some calls still leaked through even while Toronto Police dispatch — the usual filter — was impaired..A Bell Canada spokesperson sent this statement by email:“An issue with the next-generation 9-1-1 network was detected Thursday morning at roughly 3:13 a.m. ET. Backup systems were brought online to route calls to emergency services while technicians investigated the outage. 9-1-1 service is now fully restored and people with an emergency can call 9-1-1. We are investigating the root cause of the issue and will have further details once available.”The Sûreté du Québec reported a technical issue transferring some 911 calls to its centres. Montreal police said even incoming calls risked being bounced to forces elsewhere in the country. Outages were also posted in Winnipeg, New Brunswick and parts of Quebec.Bell has not named the fault, and neither Premier Doug Ford nor Solicitor General officials had issued a public accounting of how long rural OPP detachments were flying blind, whether any medical or fire calls were dropped, or what redundancy taxpayers are already paying for. Police asked residents not to flood the restored lines with test calls.
