911 service restored after outages across Quebec, parts of Canada

Bell Media says issue detected early Thursday morning now resolved

Issues with 911 service have been resolved after Quebec and other parts of Canada were hit by an outage this morning.

According to telecommunications provider Bell Media, an issue with its next-generation 911 network was detected just after 3 a.m. Thursday.

It says 911 service is now fully restored.

In a statement to CBC, the company said it is currently investigating to determine the root cause of the issue.

During the outage, Sûreté du Québec (SQ) urged people needing to report an emergency to first try calling 911 before calling local non-emergency numbers if they were unable to get through.

The Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) says it was affected by the outage between 3:35 a.m. and 4:45 a.m.

In Quebec City, the problem was resolved as of 6:17 a.m, according to the Service de police de la Ville de Québec (SPVQ).

SQ spokesperson, Valérie Beauchamp, told Radio-Canada the outage affected the routing of 911 calls to call centres in the province.

The emergency line was also down in other parts of Canada early Thursday morning, including in Ontario and Manitoba.

Police forces in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia also reported problems with the routing of 911 calls.

The SQ shared a list on its Facebook page, earlier this morning, of local call centre numbers people can reach in case they're not getting through to 911. These include:

In a post to X, the SPVM said that, for future, its non-emergency line is 514 280-2222.