Telus Blames Human Error for 39-Hour 911 Outage in Manitoba

Telus is blaming one of its own for a days-long 911 outage in Brandon, Manitoba, that left emergency calls from cell phones unanswered for nearly two days in March.

The CRTC formally requested that Telus provide a plain-language summary of the 911 outage that occurred in Brandon, Manitoba, from March 22 to 24, 2025.

In its June 5 letter, the regulator asked Telus to explain when the outage began, when it was discovered, how the company responded, what caused the failure, and why it took nearly 39 hours to restore service. The CRTC also asked for details on what Telus is doing to prevent future outages and required the company to file its response on the public record with no redactions.

In a letter of response to the CRTC dated June 16, 2025, Telus’ VP of Telecom Policy, Stephen Schmidt, admitted that a technician failed to follow proper procedures after a key piece of Bell-owned equipment went down—an error that prevented 911 calls from reaching Brandon’s emergency dispatch centre between March 22 and 24.

The outage started at 9:03 p.m. Mountain Time on March 22. Although a technician was alerted just two minutes later, Telus said that person didn’t escalate the problem internally or notify Bell, as required. This was the major misstep.

“The technician did not follow the accepted protocols,” Schmidt wrote. “This contributed to the length of the delay for this outage to be remedied.”

Telus didn’t realize that 911 calls were being blocked until March 24 at 11:00 a.m., when the dispatch centre in Brandon contacted the company directly. But service was quickly restored just over an hour later, at 12:17 p.m.—a whopping 39 hours after the problem began.

In total, 177 emergency calls placed by 59 different mobile users never made it through. That would be a helpless feeling not being able to reach emergency responders for nearly two days.

The root cause, according to Telus, was a brief four-minute failure in Bell’s 911 routing infrastructure—facilities Telus leases to connect its wireless network to emergency services in Manitoba. That short disruption knocked out all eight circuits Telus uses to route 911 traffic, including backups. The delay happened because Telus staff simply didn’t act.

Telus says it has since taken internal disciplinary action against the technician and reminded all staff of its emergency escalation protocols. The company says it’s made major technical changes to prevent this from happening again.

That includes building a completely separate backup route to Bell’s 911 system in Manitoba. If both the main and backup paths fail, Telus will now redirect 911 calls to live operators who will manually connect people to emergency dispatchers.

“Telus confirms that with these backup processes in place, 9-1-1 calls will continue to complete even with an equipment outage of this kind,” Schmidt told the Commission.

However, Telus is still refusing to release some details publicly. The company says it won’t identify the specific technology that failed or provide a network diagram of how it connects to Bell, arguing that sharing this information would make Canadian 911 systems vulnerable to sabotage. “Disclosure would provide third parties with knowledge on how to potentially cause outages,” Schmidt wrote.