Massive Bell internet outage hits over 100k customers across Ontario and Quebec

Tens of thousands of customers across the GTA and beyond struggled to start their work day on Wednesday morning thanks to a massive internet outage that seems to have extended across Southern Ontario and as far as at least Montreal and Quebec City.

Starting shortly after 9 a.m., reports of home internet issues started pouring onto social media, with people across all corners of Toronto proper — and in neighbouring locales like Richmond Hill, London, Markham, and Mississauga — jumping onto X to share their frustrations and check the status of the situation.

In Quebec too

— Patrick Gélinas 🏴‍☠️ (@PatrickGlinas2) May 21, 2025

Downdetector, a platform known for its timely and crowd-sourced information on such outages, showed a spike of more than 100,000 users potentially affected as of shortly before 10 a.m.

Those who use providers that rely on Bell's fibre optic lines, like Virgin, are experiencing the same problems. And, it appears that many are also having trouble accessing Bell customer service and using web tools like its online service outage checker. 

Residents should be aware that many businesses are citing payment processing issues as a result.

Bell Support finally addressed the complaints around 9:50 a.m., writing on X that "some customers in Ontario and Quebec may be experiencing an Internet service interruption."

"We are working to restore service as quickly as possible," the team added. "Thank you for your patience."

Downdetector shows that nearly 140,000 customers may have experienced the outage around 9 a.m., with service starting to come back sometime after 10 a.m.

The hundreds of replies to the update were as sarcastic as one could imagine given the circumstances, with many joking about the choice of words like "some" given the clearly vast extent of the blackout.

Others called it unacceptable and demanded a timeline for when they can expect things to be back up and running — something Bell did not provide.

Dude entire Ontario is down … who are you lying to?

— Technosmith (@itechnosmith) May 21, 2025

Meanwhile, local police asked the public not to call 9-1-1, as the force is experiencing an influx of calls amid what is proving to be a large and complex outage, or potentially even multiple outages that are also impeding Telus wireless service in some areas.

Durham Regional Police, for one, issued a PSA around 10 a.m. warning that "Bell and Telus are currently experiencing a network outage in Durham Region that is impacting all cellular telephone devices."

"Our 9-1-1 centre is experiencing an increase in call volume," officers continued, asking that no one call the emergency line simply "to test your phone service."

As of around 10:30 a.m., Bell home internet service started coming back online, averting a full-scale crisis like the famous Rogers outage of 2022.

This is a developing story. This post will be updated with more information as it becomes available.