911 service down for more than 2 hours for some on P.E.I.

Landlines on Prince Edward Island could not access 911 service for about two and a half hours Tuesday morning, leaving some people wondering why.

Officials with Bell Aliant said customers in P.E.I., Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were impacted from about 6 a.m. to 8:30 a.m.

Emergency officials in Nova Scotia issued an alert to let people know of the outage. 

Some Islanders received that alert on their cellphones, but the Emergency Measures Organization (EMO) in P.E.I. didn't send out an alert of its own. 

Julie MacDonald, who lives in Malpeque, P.E.I., found out about the outage through the Island RCMP's Facebook page. 

"Immediately my mind went to folks who may not have access to social media and wondered why there wasn't an emergency alert put across their system so everyone would be able to access that information," she said.

RCMP sends alerts for active threats

Nobody from EMO was available to answer questions about the incident or offer details on the methods they chose to alert people to the 911 outage. 

RCMP on P.E.I. are also authorized to send out emergency alerts, but said they only issue them when there's an active threat. 

In an email to CBC, Bell Aliant said the outage was caused by new software that was being introduced to prepare for a switch to 10-digit dialing in New Brunswick.

"Once we realized the issue, we worked to roll back the update to restore services as quickly as possible. We have adjusted our processes and safeguards to ensure that this type of issue will not happen again, including adjusting our test plans for future updates," the email said.