Report on Manitoba Telus outage reveals how many 911 calls weren’t able to connect

A new report into a Telus network outage in March reveals how many people were unable to get through to 911.

Nearly 60 people were unable to get through to 911 during a Telus network outage in March.

In a new report to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) from Telus on June 16, the company said an outage started just after 10 p.m. on March 22 and lasted until March 24 after 1 p.m.

Telus said the outage involved facilities that connect Telus to Bell’s 911 network, which directs calls to Brandon’s Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP).

Telus said a technician was sent out shortly after the outage started to investigate what happened.

“The Telus technician who attended to the outage did not follow the accepted protocols between Bell and Telus to alert about an outage affecting 911 circuits and did not follow Telus’ standard practices by failing to escalate the issue with the company,” the report reads.

Telus said the technician who responded has been disciplined.

Telus’ 911 team learned about the outage on March 24 around noon and worked with Bell to fix the issue, the report said.

During that nearly 40-hour period, Telus said 59 people tried to call 911 around 177 times but were unable to get through.

Dean Switzer’s family and friends tried to call 911 around 18 times on March 23 when he suffered a heart attack. A family friend who is an RCMP officer was eventually able to get an ambulance to the house, but the 55-year-old died later that night.

Telus said equipment failure was the reason for the outage, but the company doesn’t know why the equipment failed.

“The failure on the Bell facilities lasted approximately four minutes. However, this failure has the effect of causing failure of the eight Bell network circuits leased by Telus, which comprise both primary and redundant connections and whose function is to deliver 911 traffic from Telus’ wireless network to Bell’s 911 network destined for the Brandon PSAP.”

Following the outage, Telus said it has reviewed what happened and has now put in an alternate route to ensure 911 calls can still connect in the case of another network failure.

If this option also fails, Telus said calls will be rerouted to its operator service team.

“This new call routing will provide an added layer of reliability and resiliency to the enhanced 911 call environment. Telus confirms that with these backup processes in place, 911 calls will continue to complete even with an equipment outage of this kind.”