Telus outage in March shut down 177 calls to 911 By: Kevin Rollason Posted: 6:38 PM CDT Tuesday, Jun. 24, 2025

The scope of a 40-hour outage that affected Manitoba Telus cellphone users in March is more extensive than first reported — it turns out 59 people frantically dialled 911 without reaching help.

The Free Press has reported that family and friends of a Fisher Branch-area man who died of a heart attack had desperately called 911 for 90 minutes, unaware the system was out of service on their Telus-connected phones.

In a report, sent to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission last week, Telus said a review discovered 177 unsuccessful calls were made to 911, by 59 individual Manitobans, from when the service went down on March 22 at 8:15 p.m. to when it came up again on March 24 at about noon.

On March 23, 55-year-old Dean Switzer died while family and friends placed 22 calls to 911, which were never answered. They desperately performed CPR on him for 90 minutes.

Only after they reached out to an off-duty RCMP officer in the area, whom they knew, were emergency crews alerted. The officer went to the detachment and called an ambulance.

Telus blamed the outage on “an equipment failure on the Bell facilities, that are part of the 911 network that Telus interconnects with Bell to send calls… Telus does not know the reason for this failure.”

But Telus does admit, in the June 16 submission, it has disciplined one of its own employees over the incident.

The telecommunications company said while the employee was paged within two minutes of the original outage, they failed to follow protocols between Telus and Bell “to escalate the issue within the company. This contributed to the length of the delay for this outage to be remedied.”

The report also says that once the Telus 911 team became aware of the problem on March 24, it was fixed in just over an hour.

In response, Telus has added a double backup system, so 911 calls can still go through automatically if the main system goes down, and, if both of those also fail, it has added a third backup in which calls would be rerouted to live operators who would assist the caller and manually connect the call to emergency services.

Telus told the CRTC it couldn’t divulge further details about the outage because doing so could aid its competitors and help “bad actors” shut down the country’s 911 networks.

The Switzer family could not be reached for comment.

“It is heartbreaking.”–Interlake Gimli MLA Derek Johnson

Progressive Conservative MLA Derek Johnson said he still believes the province has to call an inquiry to probe the outage.

“It is heartbreaking,” Johnson said on Tuesday.

“I can’t imagine the emotional stress families went through at their time of need. We’ve consistently been calling for an inquiry on this. We have to get this so no other Manitoban has this happen to them.”

He said the NDP government “is failing Manitobans” by not holding an inquiry.

Mike Moroz, the minister for innovation and new technology, said Telus did not provide the additional information to the Manitoba government.

“We only found out by looking online at the CRTC,” Moroz said.

“We have no regulatory authority over telecoms. They are providing information to the people who regulate them.”

Moroz said the government wants Manitobans to have access to 911 when they need it.

“We always have to bear in mind that this is an absolute tragedy which fell on the Switzer family,” he said. “Our condolences go out to them.

“We are fortunate, now that we see the number of calls that went to 911, we are very fortunate that it wasn’t worse than it was.”

Moroz said he has not heard from any of the other dozens of Manitobans who unsuccessfully called 911 on that weekend.

“I am certainly pleased to see some additional support has been put in to make sure that 911 is there for Manitobans when we need them.”

Telus spokeswoman Liz Sauve said the latest Telus response to the CRTC was issued after the regulatory body asked the company for more information that could be released publicly.

Sauve said the latest information provided “a detailed account of what happened and how we’ve used learnings from this outage to further enhance our policies and procedures in partnership with Bell to prevent a similar situation from happening again.”

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca