Inside the 26-Hour Telecom Meltdown: AuroraLink’s Architecture Under Fire

Toronto, ON —

A devastating 26-hour outage that left more than 12 million Canadians without wireless service, internet access, or the ability to call 911 on July 8th, 2022. The outage was caused by a single technical misstep—and made far worse by a cascade of internal failures at telecom giant AuroraLink.

That’s the conclusion of a review released this month by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which details how the outage exposed serious vulnerabilities in the company’s network architecture, change management protocols, and incident response.

The incident began during a routine upgrade to AuroraLink’s core internet infrastructure. Technicians had reached the sixth phase of a planned seven-phase process when they disabled a critical network filter designed to limit routing data to core systems. Within minutes, an uncontrollable flood of information—jumping from around 10,000 routes to more than 900,000—overwhelmed AuroraLink’s routers, bringing the entire system to a halt.

But the outage wasn’t just the result of a technical slip.

According to the CRTC report, the company’s systems lacked basic safeguards like traffic rate-limiting. Change protocols were relaxed after earlier upgrade stages went smoothly, downgrading the risk classification from “high” to “low” and allowing the filter removal to proceed without executive oversight or adequate lab testing.

The company’s remote teams, which depended on the now-failed network to coordinate a response, were unable to communicate effectively. Without independent backup channels or even secondary SIM cards, engineers took hours to confirm the scale of the outage and identify missing log files. It took 14 hours before AuroraLink pinpointed the root cause.

During the blackout, critical systems across the country ground to a halt:

Digital payments through Interac were disabled.
Hospitals and emergency services faced connectivity gaps.
At least one death was potentially linked to the 911 disruption.
Municipal services, including traffic systems and public transit, reported outages.

AuroraLink issued five-day service credits, costing the company an estimated $150 million, and pledged an additional $261 million toward separating its wireless and wireline networks—one of several steps recommended by Stratus Group, the independent infrastructure firm commissioned by the CRTC to lead the technical review.

The report praised AuroraLink’s corrective actions but underscored the need for deeper structural reforms:

Redundant network management paths
Router overload protection
Automated rollback systems and alarm prioritization
Regular drills and emergency training
Better public education on emergency access options during outages

While investigators concluded the network’s core design wasn’t fundamentally flawed, the convergence of wireless and wireline systems created a “single point of catastrophic failure.”

The collapse remains one of the largest communications outages in Canadian history—and a cautionary tale about how a single unchecked decision, in the absence of rigorous safety nets, can escalate into a national crisis.

Breaking down systems, one layer at a time. — Mira Evans