Telecommunications outage hits Montreal police, fire department

The telecommunications system for Montreal police and firefighters was down today during a widespread outage.

The technical problems started around 12 p.m. andservice came back around 2 p.m., according to the city.

"The outage took place during work that was underway on the network by the provider," Valrie De Gagn, a spokesperson for the City of Montreal, said in a statement to Radio-Canada.

"Not in any moment was the safety of citizens ever in jeopardy."

De Gagn saidthe city is concerned about major technical problems affecting the police and fire departments' telecommunicationsystemand is taking steps to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Quebec courts were also paralyzed over acomputer outage during the day.