CRTC Breaks Silence on Website Issues, Won’t Address Hack Claims

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) website has been going down on and off in recent weeks, with some reports pointing to a possible hack. When we reached out to the CRTC to inquire, the regulator confirmed the outages but would not say anything about whether it was hacked.

“The CRTC is aware that some users have experienced difficulties accessing parts of its website and online services. These intermittent outages have been acknowledged on the public record, including in procedural determinations on July 30 and August 11. The CRTC continued to receive interventions and other submissions during this period,” said Megan MacLean, CRTC spokesperson, in an email to iPhone in Canada on Friday.

On the hack question specifically, the regulator stayed tight-lipped. “For security reasons, the CRTC does not comment on specific or alleged cyber security incidents, cyber security measures or technical configurations,” it said.

The CRTC also stressed that people can still take part in its proceedings even when the site is not working properly. “The CRTC takes meaningful public participation in its proceedings seriously. Parties that experience difficulties accessing information or filing submissions can contact the CRTC for assistance. If a party’s ability to participate in a proceeding or meet a filing deadline is affected by access issues, those circumstances can be brought to the CRTC’s attention and considered as part of the public record,” it said.

“Intermittent Issues” Show Up in the CRTC’s Own Records

The outages have already shown up in the regulator’s own paperwork. Back on July 30, two parties in a proceeding flagged the website problems directly.

One person trying to use the CRTC website, Marc Nanni, cited issues with the website as a reason for the request, saying that it had been intermittently offline for over 11 days, especially during the evening hours, making it difficult for them to participate in the Harmonization Proceeding.

The Forum for Research and Policy in Communications (FRPC) raised the same concern, telling the CRTC that these issues prevented them from accessing important information and documents and requested an alternative intervention deadline of August 25, 2026.

At that point the CRTC downplayed the impact. “With respect to Marc Nanni’s and FRPC’s claims regarding technical issues with the Commission’s website, the Commission notes that the website has experienced intermittent downtime recently; however, these issues have not lasted for significant periods of time. These issues, while disruptive, do not appear to have impeded fulsome participation in Commission proceedings, including the Harmonization Proceeding.”

CRTC Downplays It, Then Pushes Back a Deadline

By August 11, though, the regulator gave some ground. In a procedural notice tied to its proceeding on harmonizing the consumer protection codes, the CRTC agreed to push back a filing deadline because of the outages.

But the request came a day earlier, with the CRTC saying, “On 10 August 2026, the Commission received a joint procedural request from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP), the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications (FRPC), and the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) [collectively, the parties] seeking a two-day extension to the deadline for submitting interventions.”

“The parties indicated that the Commission website had been intermittently down between Friday, 7 August 2026, and Monday, 10 August 2026, hindering their ability to access documents and to complete their submissions.”

This time the CRTC agreed the problems were real enough to matter. “The Commission considers that parties have demonstrated that they were faced with challenges to their ability to effectively file and examine interventions during the above-noted timeframe and approves the request for an extension. The new deadline for filing interventions for all parties is 14 August 2026.”

A Reader Says They Were Locked Out for Weeks

We were alerted about the outage by an iPhone in Canada reader, who said, “I was filing with the CRTC when their site went down, and it stayed unreliable for three to four weeks. During that stretch I couldn’t participate in a few of the open public processes because I couldn’t access their website at all. At one point they actually blocked my access and rate-limited me.”

“From what I could tell, they’d thrown up some buggy Microsoft bot-detection software for a week or two to try and stop a [Distributed Denial of Service] DDoS, and it ended up locking real people out. I pasted screenshots to the CRTC showing exactly what was happening. All they admitted to was some ‘intermittent issues,’ and they flatly denied that intervenors or the public were harmed. I couldn’t reach them for over three weeks. I wasn’t the only one either,” the reader continued.

Reportedly Tied to the DDoS Group NoName

The outage is reportedly tied to a hack by the pro-Russian DDoS group called NoName. A screenshot is below, showing the group targeted the CRTC website, along with that of Transport Canada and the Quebec government website:

“FRPC even contacted the CRTC’s IT department, and they didn’t seem to know their own public-facing website was down. My understanding is they got hit by the DDoS group NoName. I only pieced this together yesterday, and now it looks like the CRTC knew the real reason, hid it, refused to admit anything, and let it materially impact the open public record across multiple files,” wrote the reader.

So while the CRTC won’t confirm or deny anything about a hack, its own records show the site has been unreliable enough over the past few weeks to knock a filing deadline back by two days.