The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the country’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, announced on Monday morning its website and phone lines are down for the count, in what appears to be an unscheduled outage.
“Please note that our website, its related applications and phone lines are temporarily unavailable, we will update you as soon as possible,” said the CRTC on Twitter.
⚠️Please note that our website, its related applications and phone lines are temporarily unavailable, we will update you as soon as possible.⚠️
— CRTCeng (@CRTCeng) February 6, 2023
Normally, when the CRTC’s website is set to go down, the regulator lets the public know well in advance, with specific times and dates. But today’s outage seems like something went awry.
This is what the CRTC website looks like in Chrome right now:
This isn’t the first time the CRTC’s website has gone down at random, but to have its phone lines and other related apps go down too, makes it seems like the situation is worse than it is. We’ve reached out to the CRTC for comment and will update this post accordingly.
During last summer’s nationwide Rogers outage, the latter took down the CRTC’s phone lines as well.
The CRTC’s new CEO and chair, Vicky Eatrides, replaced outgoing Ian Scott last month. She’s been making the rounds to media saying, “I’m very focused on competition. I’m focused on pricing,” related to internet services in Canada.
Under Ian Scott, the CRTC approved part of the Rogers-Shaw merger last March, saying “Canadians as consumers will benefit from this transaction.”
Update Feb. 6, 2023, 10:17am PT: The CRTC website is working again. “The problem affecting our website and phone lines has now been resolved and everything is in working order,” said a CRTC spokesperson to iPhone in Canada.
