Cut by construction: details emerging about why the lines went dead in Atlantic Canada

An accidental snip of two major cables caused a cell service outage across the four Atlantic Canadian provinces today.

Bell says two major cables were cut by third-party construction. The cut affected approximately 885 LTE cellular sites across Atlantic Canada, Telus said on its website.

The outage started around 11:20 a.m. NT and affected the Telus(including Koodo) and Bell networks. It wiped out cell phones anddebit and credit machines, and caused flight cancellations across Newfoundland and Labrador.

• Bell,Telusphone service down in parts of Atlantic region

Bell services were restored as of 4:30 p.m. NT, after a rerouting and repair of network infrastructure.

Pizza in line

At St. John's International Airport, Air Canada passengers had to be manually checked in for their flights, even if they had checked in online, and the airline cancelled one flight from Halifax.

Air Canadabrought pizza, coffee and snacks to its long lines of waiting passengers.

Porter flights were cancelled, but WestJet flights went ahead.

Limited 911

In St. John's, the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary warned that people wouldn't be able to dial 911 from some phones, though the service itself wasn't down during the hours-longoutage.

Theyprovided alternate numbers for people who still hadphone service to call in an emergency, and Eastern Health stationed ambulances across St. John's for emergency services.

The St. John's Regional Fire Department issued a release suggesting people in an emergency situation who were experiencingphone problems to try a neighbour's phone or pay phone, or to go to the nearest fire or police station.

Trouble for shoppers

The outage caused problems for debit and credit machines across the province, and some bank branches in the province closed their doors Friday.

Some businesses and brands in the province had a bit of fun with the outage.