911 calls restored after outage across Maritime provinces

Phone lines across the Maritimes experienced an outage Wednesday morning due to an unknown technical issue, according to multiple police organizations.

Phone lines, including 911 calls, were down in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Police in all three provinces have confirmed that phone lines have been restored and 911 is functioning normally.

In New Brunswick, police, NB Power and city halls reported disruptions around 9:30 a.m. local time.

Prince Edward Island reported cellular outages around 9:40 a.m. local time. 

Vicki Tse, a spokesperson with the P.E.I. government, said Bell Aliant experienced technical difficulties that caused the outage, disrupting the 911 infrastructure, which is based in Fredericton.

"Once we became aware of the situation, a toll-free number was provided to anyone who could not dial 911 from their mobile phones. Our first responder partners also shared this information through their networks," Tse said in an email to CBC News.

She said service was fully restored to the island by 10:30 a.m.

Around the same time, Nova Scotia RCMP tweeted that some 911 calls were not getting through due to a technical issue.

Both the New Brunswick RCMP and the Halifax Regional Police requested emergency alerts be sent out to warn people that 911 calls were disrupted this morning.

No alerts were received in either province. A spokesperson for Nova Scotia's Emergency Management Office said in an email to CBC News that staff were in the process of preparing an alert when they were informed that the Bell Aliant network was fully restored.

Bell Aliant's back-up system did not come online

Meanwhile, Bell Aliant experienced a network outage that impacted wireless and landline services throughout the Maritimes. 

Isabelle Boulet, a spokesperson for Bell Aliant, said a network switch failure in Moncton early this morning some affected calls across the Maritime provinces, including 911 in some areas.

Boulet said services were disrupted around 7:30 a.m. and continued until about 9:30 a.m. Shortly before 11 a.m., the company tweeted: "We're happy to confirm that service is now restored. Thank you." 

She confirmed there is a back-up system that would typically come online during an outage, and the company is looking into what happened. She said Bell Aliant's network team is investigating.