Bell Canada has submitted an official report to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), giving a small amount of new information as to why their systems failed in July.
On July 22nd, a series of failures affecting the Brandon Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) caused the centre to be unable to receive any new 911 calls. Notably, a fibre cable was cut in Winnipeg, in addition to another technical system failure which Bell did not disclose to the public.
The undisclosed failure happened on July 21st. Technicians were dispatched to resolve that failure, but the fibre cable cut on July 22nd, before the repairs were complete, resulted in a complete loss of 911 call delivery to the Brandon PSAP.
An emergency alert was issued to inform Manitobans that 911 call service across the province was down, as the Brandon PSAP serves all of Manitoba excluding the City of Winnipeg. The outage was fixed after approximately 3 hours and 45 minutes, with what Bell Canada says is a permanent fix to the undisclosed technical issue.
