The phone service interruption that impacted RCMP detachments a number of communities throughout the territory was caused by a severed fibre optic wire, according to Northwestel.
On May 12th at around 2:30 p.m. Pacific time, a fibre cable was damaged in a remote part of Northern B.C., possibly due to road construction happening in the area, Northwestel said in a statement.
Long-distance phone services were impacted in NWT and Nunavut with Internet service to Ulukhaktok also being impacted.
There were also interruptions to Internet, long-distance phone and television services in Yukon and parts of northern B.C. were reported. Limited cellular service remained available.
Northwestel technicians travelled to the impacted area and were able to conduct repairs and restore the connection early this morning. We continue to work to test our systems and ensure all services are restored. We thank our customers for their patience over the past hours.
RCMP announced today service should be back to normal. On Wednesday, there were service interruptions impacting calls to the dispatch centre in Yellowknife as well as local RCMP offices throughout the territory.
Calls to the RCMP experienced similar disruptions in March 2020, after an outage when a fibre wire was cut in northern B.C.
