Canadian telco EBOX hit by brief outage

Canadian telecommunications company EBOX experienced an outage lasting around an hour, starting at roughly 16:30 UTC.

The downtime appears to have primarily impacted users in Quebec and Ontario, and came at the start of the FIFA World Cup’s opening match.

Headquartered in Longueuil, Quebec, EBOX did not disclose what happened to cause its services to go down. Customers also reported issues with rival Videotron, but that company said that it did not have any reports of problems on its network.

“Connectivity has returned to Internet provider EBOX in Canada after a widespread outage impacting many users in Quebec and Ontario; timings indicate that online viewers likely missed the offside controversy and both goals of the QAT-ECU FIFA World Cup opening match,” outage tracking group NetBlocks said on Twitter.

In February, EBOX was acquired by Bell Canada, which promised to invest in building out the Internet service provider’s infrastructure.

Bell is Canada’s largest communications company, outstripping rival Rogers – which itself suffered a major outage this July.

That incident took out emergency services numbers, ATMs, financial institutions, and other critical services. Data Center Dynamics