Manitoba Telecom Services affected 911, landlines, cell service; Twitter abuzz

WINNIPEG — Manitoba Telecom Services Inc. says landline, wireless, and 911 are back working again in the province.

On Monday, all three services were not working and it wasn’t until after 9 p.m. that MTS reported services were restored.

The telecom company tweeted the news in an update just after 9:15 p.m. and then confirmed it in an email to the Winnipeg Free Press.

“Wireless and wireline services impacted by an issue on Monday have been restored.

We’ll continue to closely monitor the situation… we would like to thank you for your patience,” MTS said in its tweet.

For nearly four hours, 911 service in Manitoba was affected by MTS outages that had the telecom apologizing on Twitter.

Not everyone was affected by the MTS outages.

There were no reports as of late Monday of any medical emergencies created by the outages.

Michael Anderson, who owns an IT company, says he’s never seen a problem go on that long and affect both wired and wireless communications systems at the same time.

The two are usually on separate systems.

“Our help desk has been unreachable for seven or eight hours… I don’t remember anything this serious ever. It has to be pretty significant,” Anderson said.

He also said the outages would cause problems for health providers, such as his wife, who is doctor in Steinbach, part of an on-call obstetrics group.

“If she has a patient who requires, say, an emergency C-section, well, the surgeon is on call.

If that surgeon is on an MTS cell, he’s unreachable. That’s a problem.”

MTS had not offered any cause for the problems as of Monday night.