The CRTC website – https://www.crtc.gc.ca – has been down for the past three days because someone forgot to renew its security certificate. It may be back up by the time you read this, but otherwise, try https://web.crtc.gc.ca.
To me, the frequent internal website failures should be embarrassing for the regulatory body chosen by Parliament to manage and oversee so much of Canada’s digital world. I count at least 13 days of planned and unplanned outages since mid-August of 2025:
- Scheduled: August 22-24, 2025
- Scheduled: September 20-21, 2025
- Scheduled: October 3-5, 2025
- Unplanned: November 5, 2025
- Unplanned: December 10, 2025
- and now, unplanned: April 4-6, 2026
That is barely 1 nine performance, 95% uptime, in a world where we target non-stop resilience.
Last November, I wrote “Network resilience in competitive telecom markets”, acknowledging that all networks will fail at some point.
Improving network resilience helps ameliorate the situation when a failure condition exists.
Increasingly complex network architectures, coupled with more extreme environmental conditions, will lead to the potential for more network failure events, with even greater impact.
How do service providers build more resilient networks? How does the industry collectively create a more resilient national infrastructure? What is the role of government regulatory authorities, policy makers, and emergency preparedness organizations?
Last September, the CRTC issued a decision requiring reporting of service disruptions by telecom service providers. Seeing the duration of the CRTC website failure on a holiday weekend, I have to wonder if anyone at the CRTC would read or respond to a telecom carrier failure outide normal business hours.
My November blog post talked about two consultations that were launched that same day:
- “Development of a regulatory policy on measures to improve the resiliency of telecommunications networks and the reliability of telecommunications services” [TNC CRTC 2025-226]; and
- “Consumer protections in the event of a service outage or disruption” [TNC CRTC 2025-227].
I had a number of comments about the value of a more consultative approach to improve network resilience, exploring how the Commission can contribute to the proactive planning and coordination across all branches of government. Indeed, the Commission could benefit from learning how to get the CRTC website to be more resilient.