Strategies to Combat Internet Outages for Business
Internet outages are one of those things you don’t think about until they happen, and when they do, everything stops. No debit transactions. No cloud apps. No VoIP phones. No email. For businesses that depend on the internet (which is essentially all of them in 2026), an outage doesn’t just mean inconvenience, it means lost revenue, lost productivity, and frustrated customers.
Canadians learned this the hard way. The July 2022 Rogers outage knocked out service for over 12 million subscribers for nearly 19 hours, taking down Interac debit systems nationwide, disrupting 911 access, and costing the Canadian economy an estimated $142 million in a single day. More recently, in May 2025, a Bell router update caused a multi-province outage affecting over 130,000 customers across Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, with cascading impacts on TELUS and wholesale providers like TekSavvy who share Bell’s infrastructure.
The good news? Most business internet outages are preventable or at least manageable, if you plan ahead. This guide covers why outages happen, what they actually cost, and the practical steps Canadian businesses can take to stay online when things go wrong.
What’s in This Guide
Why Internet Outages Happen
Understanding what causes outages helps you protect against them. Here are the seven most common causes, ranked roughly by how often they hit Canadian businesses:
1. Human Error & Software Failures
This is the big one, and it’s responsible for far more outages than most people realize. Industry research estimates that human error contributes to 66–80% of all downtime incidents, with most stemming from staff failing to follow change management procedures. The massive 2022 Rogers outage? Caused by a coding error during a routine network upgrade. The May 2025 Bell outage? Triggered by a router update that went wrong. In both cases, the technology itself wasn’t the problem, it was the process of updating it.
2. Physical Infrastructure Damage
Fibre cuts from construction, cable damage from rodents, and vandalism can all take out your connection. In New Brunswick, Bell customers in early 2026 were cut off due to copper theft criminals stealing the physical cables for scrap metal. Underground fibre is generally more resilient than overhead lines, but no physical infrastructure is immune to damage.
3. Power Outages
Your internet equipment needs electricity to work. Even if your ISP’s network is fine, a local power outage will take your router, switches, and access points offline. This is especially common in rural areas and during Canadian winter storms. Your ISP’s equipment also needs power, and while major carriers have battery backup at their nodes, those batteries typically last only 4–8 hours.
4. Network Congestion
Shared internet connections (which include most small business cable and fibre plans) can slow down dramatically during peak usage. While this usually means slower speeds rather than a complete outage, for businesses relying on VoIP or real-time cloud applications, heavy congestion can feel like an outage. This is one of the key differences between shared and dedicated (leased line) internet.
5. Cyberattacks
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks flood a network or server with traffic until it collapses. Ransomware can lock you out of your own systems entirely. According to the Verizon 2025 Data Breach Report, small and mid-sized businesses experience ransomware-related breaches at more than double the rate of large enterprises, 88% versus 39%. Cybersecurity is no longer optional for any business, regardless of size.
6. Natural Disasters & Weather
Canadian businesses face ice storms, wildfires, flooding, and extreme cold, all of which can damage infrastructure and cause extended outages. The 2023 Nova Scotia wildfires and 2024 Jasper wildfire both caused significant telecom disruptions. Climate-related outages are increasingly common and tend to last longer than technical failures because physical infrastructure must be repaired or rebuilt.
7. Cascading Failures (Provider Dependence)
This is the hidden risk most businesses don’t think about. Many Canadian ISPs, including TELUS in Ontario/Quebec and wholesale providers like TekSavvy, rely on Bell or Rogers infrastructure underneath. When the underlying carrier goes down, everyone using their network goes down too. The May 2025 Bell outage demonstrated this perfectly: TELUS blamed the disruption on Bell’s infrastructure, and TekSavvy customers on Bell lines were knocked offline even though neither company had any internal issues.
⚠️ The “Different Provider” Trap: Having two internet connections from different ISPs doesn’t guarantee diversity if both providers use the same underlying infrastructure. Always ask: “Do you own the infrastructure, or are you reselling someone else’s network?” True redundancy means different physical paths from different carriers. Learn more in our guide on internet diversity vs. redundancy.
Major Canadian Outages — A Recent History
Canada’s concentrated telecom market (dominated by Bell, Rogers, and TELUS) means that when one carrier fails, the impact is enormous. Here’s what we’ve seen:
| Date | Carrier | What Happened | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| July 2022 | Rogers | Coding error during core network upgrade caused cascading failure across wireless and wireline networks | 12+ million users offline for ~19 hours. Interac debit down nationwide. 911 access disrupted. Estimated $142 million economic cost. Rogers spent $261 million on network separation afterwards. |
| May 2025 | Bell (cascading to TELUS, TekSavvy) | Router update impacted Bell’s wireline network across Eastern Canada | 130,000+ users at peak. Ontario, Quebec, Maritimes affected. TELUS and wholesale providers also disrupted due to shared infrastructure. Some customers received bill credits up to $67. |
| March 2024 | TELUS | Outage affecting 911 interconnection trunks in Brandon, Manitoba | Emergency 911 access disrupted. TELUS voluntarily reported to CRTC despite being below mandatory threshold. Investigation took over a year. |
| April 2021 | Rogers | Software update failure affecting wireless services nationally | Wireless voice, SMS, and data services down across Canada for most of the day. |
Real-World Lesson from Rogers 2022: The Rogers outage didn’t just affect Rogers customers. Because Interac — Canada’s debit payment network, relied on Rogers infrastructure, businesses across the entire country couldn’t process debit transactions, regardless of their ISP. The Calgary Stampede went cash-only. Concerts were cancelled. Some people couldn’t reach 911. The CRTC’s post-incident report (published July 2024) found that Rogers’ converged core network architecture, where wireless and wireline traffic shared the same backbone, meant a single failure cascaded across everything. Rogers has since invested $261 million to physically separate these networks.
What Downtime Actually Costs Your Business
The statistics you’ll see online about downtime costs can be misleading. The often cited “$9,000 per minute” figure applies to billion-dollar enterprises, not a 15-person accounting firm in Winnipeg. Here’s a more realistic breakdown for Canadian businesses:
| Business Size | Estimated Cost Per Hour | What’s Included |
|---|---|---|
| Micro business (1–5 employees) | $200–$1,000 | Lost productivity, missed orders/calls, manual workarounds |
| Small business (5–25 employees) | $1,000–$8,000 | Above + lost sales, employee idle time, SLA penalties to your own clients |
| Medium business (25–100 employees) | $8,000–$25,000 | Above + customer churn, reputation damage, recovery costs |
| Large business (100+ employees) | $25,000–$100,000+ | Above + regulatory penalties, legal liability, data loss risks |
Sources: ITIC estimates micro SMBs face approximately $100,000/hour in downtime costs. CloudSecureTech’s 2025 analysis found that for a company with 100 employees, even just daily micro-outages (averaging 15.3 minutes per employee per day) can cost over $250,000 annually in lost wages alone. Atlassian puts small business downtime at $137–$427 per minute.
How to Calculate Your Own Downtime Cost
Use this simple formula: Downtime Cost = Lost Revenue + Lost Productivity + Recovery Costs
Lost Revenue: Annual revenue ÷ 52 weeks ÷ 40 hours = hourly revenue at risk
Lost Productivity: Number of employees × average hourly compensation × percentage of work dependent on internet
Recovery Costs: IT staff overtime, customer appeasement, data re-entry, expedited fixes
For most small businesses, the math usually shows that investing $100–$300/month in a backup connection is dramatically cheaper than even a single 4-hour outage per year.
But the numbers don’t capture everything. The hidden costs of downtime, customer trust erosion, missed deadlines, damaged reputation, employee frustration, are harder to quantify but often more damaging long-term. According to the Ponemon Institute, the largest share of downtime costs isn’t lost revenue, it’s business disruption, including reputational damage and customer churn.
How to Prevent Internet Outages
You can’t prevent every outage — but you can dramatically reduce your exposure and minimize the impact when one does happen. Here’s what works:
1. Diversify Your Internet Connections
This is the single most effective thing you can do. Having a backup internet connection on a completely different carrier and technology means you stay online when your primary goes down. The key word is different different provider, different physical path, ideally different technology (e.g., fibre primary + LTE or satellite backup).
In Canada, common backup combinations include:
- Bell fibre + Rogers LTE backup (or vice versa) different carriers, different physical networks
- Any wired connection + Starlink satellite is completely independent of ground infrastructure
- Cable/fibre + mobile hotspot a business mobile plan can serve as emergency fallback
Pro Tip — True Diversity Matters: Not all “backup” connections are truly diverse. If your primary internet is Bell fibre and your “backup” is TekSavvy using Bell’s wholesale lines, you’re not protected, because both go down when Bell goes down. Similarly, your LTE backup won’t help if your LTE provider shares infrastructure with your wired ISP. Always verify that your backup uses a physically separate network path.
2. Use Automatic Failover
A backup connection you have to manually switch to during an outage is far less useful than one that kicks in automatically. Both Bell and Rogers offer LTE/5G wireless backup services for business customers that automatically failover when the primary wireline connection drops:
- Bell Wireless Backup: Uses Bell’s LTE/5G network as automatic failover for wireline connections. Available for medium and large business customers.
- Rogers LTE Backup: Built into select business internet plans. Automatically switches to Rogers wireless network during wireline disruptions.
- Third-party failover devices: Brands like Cradlepoint, Peplink, Teltonika, and Datto offer routers with built-in LTE/5G failover that work with any carrier’s SIM card, giving you true carrier choice. Fidalia’s UltraSwitch ($129/month) offers managed failover with IP address consistency across carriers.
Important: Carrier-provided LTE backup (Bell, Rogers) uses their own wireless network. This means if the same carrier has a major outage affecting both wireline and wireless (like Rogers in 2022), your backup fails too. For maximum resilience, use a third-party failover device with a SIM from a different carrier than your primary ISP.
3. Invest in Battery Backup (UPS)
An Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) keeps your internet equipment, modem, router, switches, access points, running during a power outage. A basic UPS costs $100–$300 and can keep your networking equipment running for 30–90 minutes, which is enough to ride out most brief power interruptions.
For longer outages, a small generator ($500–$2,000) can keep your critical systems running for hours. If your business is in an area prone to power outages, this is one of the highest-ROI investments you can make.
4. Move to Cloud-Based Applications
If your data and applications live on local servers, an internet outage means you can’t access anything. If they’re in the cloud (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, cloud-based accounting, cloud POS), your data is safe and accessible from any device with any internet connection, including a mobile hotspot from your phone.
Cloud migration also protects you from on-site disasters (fire, flood, theft) that could destroy local hardware. For most small and medium businesses, cloud-first is the right strategy for both productivity and resilience.
5. Strengthen Your Cybersecurity
With SMBs facing ransomware at double the rate of large enterprises, cybersecurity-caused outages are a growing threat. Essential protections include:
- Business-grade firewall not your ISP’s consumer-grade modem/router
- DNS filtering blocks known malicious websites before employees can visit them
- Regular, tested backups — including at least one air-gapped (offline) backup that ransomware can’t reach
- Employee training phishing remains the #1 entry point for ransomware
- DDoS protection many business ISPs include basic DDoS mitigation. Bell’s dedicated internet plans include built-in network DDoS defences.
6. Choose the Right Service Level
Not all internet plans are equal when it comes to uptime guarantees. Understanding the difference matters:
| Feature | Shared Business Internet | Dedicated Internet (DIA) |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime guarantee | “Best effort” — no formal SLA | 99.9%+ SLA (max ~8.7 hours downtime/year) |
| Support response | Next business day | 4-hour or less response, 24/7 |
| Financial penalty if they fail | No | Yes — bill credits based on downtime |
| Typical monthly cost | $65–$330 | $400–$3,500+ |
For most small businesses, shared fibre with a backup connection provides better real-world resilience than dedicated internet alone, and at a fraction of the cost. Read more about business internet pricing in Canada to understand the cost trade-offs.
Building Your Backup Internet Strategy
Here’s a practical, step-by-step approach based on your business size and how much downtime you can tolerate:
Ask yourself: “If our internet goes down right now, what stops working?” Map out every business function that depends on connectivity: payment processing, phone system (VoIP), email, cloud apps, security cameras, inventory management. Then estimate how much each hour of downtime costs you using the formula above.
Do you have only one ISP? Is everything on the same power circuit? Does your VoIP phone system have a mobile failover? If your office has one fibre connection from one carrier, you have a single point of failure, and the 2022 Rogers outage showed that even Canada’s largest carriers aren’t immune.
Here are practical options, from cheapest to most resilient:
| Backup Option | Monthly Cost | Failover Speed | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile hotspot (phone tethering) | $0 (uses existing plan) | Manual, 2–5 min | Solo/micro businesses, emergency only |
| Dedicated mobile data plan | $30–$75 | Manual, 1–3 min | Small businesses, temporary fallback |
| Starlink residential | $70–$140 | Manual or semi-auto | Rural businesses, completely independent backup |
| Carrier LTE backup (Bell/Rogers) | Bundled or $50–$100 | Automatic, seconds | Retail, restaurants, any business with POS |
| Third-party failover device | $100–$200 + data | Automatic, seconds | Businesses needing true carrier diversity |
| Second wired ISP (different carrier) | $65–$200 | Automatic with dual-WAN router | Offices where downtime = major revenue loss |
A backup connection you’ve never tested is a liability, not an asset. At least quarterly: unplug your primary connection and verify that your backup actually works, that your critical systems (POS, VoIP, cloud apps) function on the backup bandwidth, and that your team knows what to do. Many businesses discover their backup is misconfigured or their LTE SIM has expired only when they actually need it.
Every business should have a simple, documented plan that covers: who is responsible for diagnosing and responding to outages, how to check if the outage is local (your equipment) vs. ISP-wide, how to communicate with employees and customers during an outage (text messages, not email/VoIP, since those may be down too), and when to escalate to your ISP or activate your backup. Keep this plan printed (not just in a cloud document you can’t access during an outage).
New CRTC Rules What Changed in 2025
Following the Rogers 2022 outage and the Bell 2025 disruption, the CRTC has significantly strengthened its oversight of telecom reliability. In September 2025, the CRTC finalized new mandatory outage reporting rules (Telecom Decision 2025-225) that took effect November 4, 2025:
- Mandatory 2-hour notification: All Canadian telecom providers must notify the CRTC and other government authorities within 2 hours of becoming aware of a major service outage.
- 30-day post-outage reports: Providers must file comprehensive reports within 30 days detailing the cause, impact, and corrective actions taken. Abridged versions are published publicly on the CRTC’s website.
- 911 outages reported immediately: Any outage affecting 911 services — regardless of duration — must be reported to local emergency call centres within 30 minutes.
- Major outage threshold: A “major primary service outage” is defined as a complete loss of service lasting at least 30 minutes with 600,000+ “user-minutes” affected (e.g., 20,000 users offline for 30 minutes).
- Emergency roaming: Canada’s major telecoms have signed a Memorandum of Understanding pledging to provide emergency roaming and mutual assistance during major outages, meaning if one carrier goes down, affected customers can potentially use a competitor’s network for emergency calls.
What This Means for Businesses: The CRTC is also consulting on mandatory consumer protections during outages, including automatic refunds or bill credits for affected customers (Consultation 2025-227). While these protections aren’t finalized yet, the direction is clear: carriers are facing increasing accountability for outages. In the meantime, businesses should always request bill credits after any significant outage, the May 2025 Bell outage saw customers successfully secure credits of $10–$67 by calling their carrier and asking.
Your Internet Resilience Checklist
Here’s a quick-reference checklist to assess and improve your business’s outage readiness:
| ✓ | Action | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| ☐ | Identify all business functions dependent on internet | 🔴 Do today |
| ☐ | Calculate your hourly downtime cost | 🔴 Do today |
| ☐ | Set up a backup internet connection on a different carrier | 🔴 This week |
| ☐ | Install a UPS on your modem, router, and critical networking equipment | 🔴 This week |
| ☐ | Verify your backup ISP uses different physical infrastructure | 🟡 This month |
| ☐ | Migrate critical applications to the cloud (if not already) | 🟡 This month |
| ☐ | Implement automatic failover (dual-WAN router or LTE backup) | 🟡 This month |
| ☐ | Set up air-gapped backups for critical business data | 🟡 This month |
| ☐ | Write and distribute an outage response plan (printed copy) | 🟡 This quarter |
| ☐ | Test your backup connection and failover process | 🟢 Quarterly |
| ☐ | Review cybersecurity: firewall, DNS filtering, employee training | 🟢 Ongoing |
| ☐ | Stay informed about ISP outages (Downdetector, ISP status pages) | 🟢 Ongoing |
Frequently Asked Questions
What should I do right now if my business internet is down?
First, check if it’s a local issue: restart your modem and router (unplug for 30 seconds, then reconnect). Check your ISP’s status page or Downdetector.ca to see if it’s a wider outage. If it is your ISP, switch to your backup connection (mobile hotspot, LTE backup, or secondary ISP). Notify your team about the outage and any temporary workarounds. Document the outage start time, you’ll need this to request bill credits later.
Can I get a refund from my ISP after an outage?
Yes, but you usually have to ask. After the May 2025 Bell outage, customers who called and requested credits received $10–$67 depending on their plan and the impact described. After the 2022 Rogers outage, Rogers issued 5 days of service credits to all affected customers (about $150 million total). The CRTC is currently consulting on mandatory automatic refunds for future outages, but for now, call your ISP after any significant disruption and request a credit. If they refuse, you can file a complaint with the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS).
Is Starlink a good backup for business internet?
Starlink is an excellent backup because it’s completely independent of ground-based infrastructure. When fibre gets cut or a carrier has a network failure, Starlink keeps working. At $70–$140/month for residential plans (which many small businesses use), it’s affordable as a secondary connection. The main limitations: latency is higher than fibre (25–50ms vs. 5–15ms), you need a clear view of the sky, and speeds can vary with congestion. For a primary connection with an SLA, Starlink’s Priority/Business plan at ~$250/month is the better choice. See our Starlink Business Guide for more detail.
How often do major internet outages happen in Canada?
Major nationwide outages (like Rogers 2022) are rare, perhaps once every few years per major carrier. But smaller, regional outages happen more frequently. The CRTC’s new reporting requirements (effective November 2025) will provide much better data on outage frequency going forward. For your business planning, assume that your primary ISP will have at least one significant outage per year lasting several hours, and plan accordingly.
What’s the cheapest way to protect my business from outages?
A UPS for your networking equipment ($100–$300 one-time) plus a mobile data plan on a different carrier ($30–$75/month) gives you basic protection against both power outages and ISP failures for under $100/month. If your internet goes down, tether your phone or use a dedicated mobile hotspot to keep critical systems (POS, email) running. It’s not perfect, but it covers the most common scenarios.
Do I really need a dedicated internet connection (DIA) for reliability?
Not necessarily. A dedicated connection gives you an SLA and guaranteed uptime, which is valuable, but a shared fibre connection with a properly configured backup on a different carrier often provides better real-world resilience at a lower total cost. A DIA protects you from congestion and gives you recourse (bill credits) when service fails, but it doesn’t protect you from carrier-wide outages. A shared fibre plan ($65–$200/month) + a separate LTE or Starlink backup ($70–$140/month) gives you true path diversity for less than most DIA circuits. Learn more about why business internet costs more.
The Bottom Line
Internet outages in Canada aren’t a matter of if, they’re a matter of when. Even Canada’s largest carriers have experienced major failures in recent years, and the CRTC’s new reporting rules reflect a reality that Canadians and their businesses need better protection.
The good news is that protecting your business doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. A UPS, a backup connection on a different carrier, automatic failover, and a simple outage response plan will handle the vast majority of scenarios. The businesses that got through the Rogers 2022 outage and the Bell 2025 outage with minimal impact were the ones that had already planned for exactly this situation.
Don’t wait for the next outage to make a plan. Use the checklist above, set up your backup this week, and test it. Your future self, and your customers, will thank you.
