Northwestel says Friday’s disruption to landline phone services across the NWT and Nunavut was caused by a wildfire in northern BC.
Just after 12:30pm on Friday, a spokesperson for the company said some cell service was affected as well as both local and long-distance landline calls.
By 1:45pm, Northwestel said all services had been restored.
The precise wildfire responsible for the outage was not identified, but Northwestel said fibre infrastructure has been damaged and work to repair it continues.
The breakdown in northern phone systems came a day after the NWT government’s website went down for hours, with all territorial services and GNWT employees’ email access affected. There was no suggestion of a link between the two.
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New fires are being identified in BC even this week as the province’s fire season continues well into the fall.
