OPINION: What’s up (or down) with the CRTC’s website?

The CRTC is currently inviting comments on 62 broadcasting, telecom or broadcasting-telecom proceedings. The intervention deadlines for 34 of these proceedings fall in August; 25 deadlines are set for September and another 3 for October. Filing CRTC comments online is easy when interveners know the proceeding name or number and can find the related “Submit” button on its website. There’s just one hitch: different parts of the CRTC’s English-language public-facing website have been offline intermittently since June. Its calls for comment, policies and decisions have been impossible to access, along with the ‘Submit’ button itself. These outages happened during workdays, at night and on weekends, sometimes briefly but also for hours and days on end. Long-time CRTC website users know that its practice for years has been to notify users about scheduled website maintenance through its daily announcements. Yet the outages that began in June were not announced beforehand and the messages users received varied from no message at all (when no documents were listed for archived decisions on June 12) to empty pages and “HTTP Error 500.30” (July 18). Other messages included “Our website is temporarily unavailable. Please check back soon.” (July 26, August 8, August 10, August 14), the ever-popular “403 Forbidden” (August 10) and “The resource cannot be found. … could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.” (August 20). A basic problem is that malfunctions of the CRTC’s website generally also make its “Contact us” link inoperative too: how then, can users let the CRTC know that they are having problems? The Forum for Research and Policy in Communications (FRPC) contacted the CRTC’s staff about the outages in early June. By July 23 and July 26 the CRTC was being asked to extend some deadlines because its website outages made it impossible to access public documents. On July 30, the CRTC said that while “the website has experienced intermittent downtime recently … these issues have not lasted for significant periods of time.” It denied deadline-extension requests because the public had been filing interventions since June 12, concluding that any outages had not “impeded fulsome participation in Commission proceedings”. Problems with the CRTC’s public website persisted. With deadlines for two proceedings set for 8 p.m. ET on August 11 (interveners’ replies regarding unsolicited telecommunications and comments on the CRTC’s proposal to harmonize its wireless, Internet, residential lines and BDU codes), its site was down beginning August 8. 'Heavy' users' usage was impeded; were 'average' or 'light' users similarly affected? Again, users had no way of knowing given the many different error messages they received. Late on August 10, the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, and the FRPC jointly asked the CRTC to extend the harmonized-codes deadline by two days. The CRTC granted a three-day extension on August at 4 p.m. ET, acknowledging that the parties had “demonstrated that they were faced with challenges” over the weekend. Different pages on the CRTC’s public-facing website remain unavailable sporadically and for differing periods – sometimes a few minutes, sometimes hours. At times, accessible pages contain errors: until mid-afternoon on August 20 the CRTC’s “Today’s Releases” page displayed the date of August 19 while announcing a decision issued on August 20. Something is clearly wrong. According to a posting on X on August 18, NoName said it aimed a distributed denial of service (DDoS) at the CRTC. Is this true? Are the CRTC’s inward-facing or private pages similarly affected? The public has no way of knowing – but deserves both accountability and transparency from an agency that assures Canadians constantly that it has their interests at heart and wants to hear from them. Monica Auer is executive director of the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications, a non-partisan organization focused on research and policy about Canada's communications system. The positions and opinions expressed by The Wire Report columnists and contributors are solely reflective of the author’s perspective and do not necessarily reflect The Wire Report’s views or values.

OPINION: What’s up (or down) with the CRTC’s website?

Regulatory |
By Monica Auer
|August 24, 2026

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OPINION: What’s up (or down) with the CRTC’s website?

Regulatory | By Monica Auer |August 24, 2026

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