A report is providing new details about the scope and impact of last month’s 911 outage. A total of 84 unique callers were unable to call 911 during the outage on July 22 that lasted three hours and 45 minutes. That’s according to a new report to the CRTC Thursday from Bell—Manitoba’s 911 provider and CTV’s parent company. Bell said the outage was caused in part by a third party that cut a fibre cable in Winnipeg. This led to a complete loss of 911 calls to the call centre in Brandon, which handles all emergency calls outside Winnipeg. However, according to the report, to date no critical incidents or adverse public safety outcomes have been reported as a result. Bell said it is in the process of switching over to a next generation 911 network by the end of the year, adding these types of outages won’t happen with the new system. Until then, it’s added two additional routes for 911 calls in case the two existing routes were to fail again.
