What is the CRTC doing about services outages?
Networks can go down, causing an outage. When this happens, you may not be able to access Internet, cellphone, home phone, and television services.
The CRTC expects telecommunications providers to:
- prevent outages
- reduce the length and impact of outages
- improve service reliability
- maintain an adequate level of access to emergency services during an outage, if technically feasible
The CRTC held a public consultation and set the final notification and reporting requirements for major telecommunications service outages. All telecommunications service providers must promptly notify the CRTC and other government authorities of major service outages within two hours and provide a comprehensive post-outage report within 30 days. They must also immediately notify relevant emergency management organizations and 9-1-1 call centres of outages affecting emergency services.
These requirements will enable public safety authorities to better support telecommunications service providers and Canadians during major service outages and ultimately help restore the affected services as quickly as possible. The post-outage reports cover how service providers will prevent similar outages in the future and will be published on the CRTC’s reported service outages webpage.
The CRTC launched two more public consultations on September 4, 2025. The first consultation aims to improve network resiliency and service reliability, while the second consultation aims to help protect Canadians in the event of a service outage or interruption.
These actions are part of the CRTC’s Consumer Protections Action Plan, which aims to help reduce the occurrence of service outages and ensure that Canadians have access to reliable and high-quality telecommunications and broadcasting services, including emergency and accessibility services.
The CRTC is also working to improve the reliability of Canada’s telecommunications services through its actions in the Far North, improvement of the Broadband Fund, and decision to improve the resiliency of 9-1-1 and public alerting services.
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