SaskTel investigating root cause of Friday’s service outage

SaskTel says it hopes to wrap up its ongoing investigation to what caused its “system network failure” for customers on Aug. 22. (Sierra D'Souza Butts)

SaskTel is examining the cause of a “system network failure” that affected cellular services for customers occurred late last week.

“We are still conducting a thorough investigation, but we were able to restore services because we discovered there was a system network failure,” SaskTel spokesperson Greg Jacobs told CTV News.

“We were able to reroute traffic within the network, which then allowed us to restore services.”

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The company hopes to conclude its investigation by the end of the week, but cannot confirm the exact timeline.

The outage began around 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 22, impacting cellular services and business customers. Emergency services were unaffected by the outage.

SaskTel said the network was fully restored by 4:45 p.m. Friday.

“We experienced a system outage that intermittently impacted wireless calls and IBC phone services for our business customers,” Jacobs explained. “As soon as we were informed of the outage, our technicians started to work to troubleshoot and investigate the cause.”

Once the cause of the outage is determined, Jacobs says a plan will be put in place to avoid similar situations in the future.

“911 services were operational throughout the entire outage, but we do apologize to all of our customers that were impacted for any inconvenience that it may have caused, and we thank them for their patience while we work to restore it as quickly as possible,” he added.

According to SaskTel, the Crown serves approximately 3,000 business customers and around 600,000 customers connected to its cellular and voice services.