911 service restored after widespread disruption in phone service

Police say 911 service has been restored after a morning of technical problems disrupted the emergency phone line and landlines throughout New Brunswick.

On Twitter, Bell Aliant confirmed service has been restored, saying a "network issue" affected wireless and landline voice services for some customers in Atlantic Canada on Wednesday morning.

In an email to CBC News, Bell Aliant spokesperson Isabelle Boulet said a network switch failure in Moncton early this morning affected wireless and landline calls to varying degrees in the Atlantic provinces, including 911 service in some areas.

"Our network team is continuing its technical investigation into the outage."

Police forces, NB Power, local businesses and city halls across the province were all reporting disruptions, and police in different locations offered the public alternative numbers to call in an emergency. 

People can now call 911., but people were urged not to call just to check on whether the line is working. 

Kennebecasis Regional Police Force Insp. Anika Becker said officers were providing personal cell phone numbers as substitutes for 911 calls. 

She said the police force doesn't have a procedure in case 911 calls don't go through, but they plan to develop one after today's outage.

RCMP on Prince Edward Island and in Nova Scotia reported similar problems with phone service.

"This morning's service outage caused some anxiety as it affected 911 service," said Coreen Enos, spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety.

"We appreciate Bell's quick action to restore service, and are looking forward to learning what happened. The system is supposed to have redundancies that prevent outages, so it's essential to public health and safety that Bell learns from the outage."

At 9:15 a.m., New Brunswick RCMP said on Twitter that a public Alert Ready message had been requested, but nothing was sent out before the 911 service was fixed, news that RCMP tweeted at 10:42. a.m.