Bell has filed a report with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) detailing the cause of a recent October 6, 2025 service outage that disrupted data access for customers roaming outside Canada.
According to the Post-Outage and Final Report, submitted by Assistant General Counsel Philippe Gauvin, the issue began at 11:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time and was caused by a failure in Bell’s internal charging system.
“We identified the problem as a capacity issue in our charging system,” the company wrote in a letter dated October 20, 2025. “This system is responsible for tasks such as traffic calculation and quota management and is required for our roaming systems (i.e. this tracks customer data usage vs what they have purchased).”
The outage meant that customers traveling abroad could not access mobile data on other networks. To restore service, Bell said it modified its systems later that day: “After identifying the root cause, we modified our roaming system at 16:18 to temporarily bypass the charging system. We also increased the capacity of our charging/authentication system.”
Bell told the CRTC that emergency and accessibility services were not affected during the incident. Looking ahead, the telecom giant says it’s taking steps to ensure a similar breakdown won’t happen again. “In addition to the extra capacity added to our systems, we also plan to adjust our roaming system so that if the charging system becomes un-available, roaming services will not be impacted,” Bell stated.
The company submitted the report to meet the CRTC’s direction under Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2023-39, which requires detailed explanations for major service outages.
The outage meant those roaming in the U.S. and overseas lost access to data roaming while travelling, which definitely would come as a shock to families trying to contact each other while on vacation, for example.
Bell ended the filing by saying the report addressed all the required points. The outage adds to a growing list of recent incidents that have drawn increased attention from regulators concerned about network reliability and openness.
Back in September, the CRTC launched a consultation that required wireless carriers to respond to outages with reports. The Commission launched another survey back in September seeking feedback from Canadians on the same subject matter too.
Update Oct. 22, 2025: Clarified only data services saw an outage, but voice and texts were still available, according to a Bell spokesperson to iPhone in Canada.
Thanks @fanCRTCProfling
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The CRTC should look at requiring the carriers to enable Wi-Fi calling while out of the country where it is legal as it is my understanding that Bell is one of the carriers that does not allow this.