OTTAWA — The first alert that the Armed Forces’ mobile email service was out came from Defence Minister Bill Blair’s military assistant.

Maj. Gillian Sheehan contacted the Defence Department technical team’s “VVIP” section at 11 a.m. EDT on June 15, a Saturday. The day before, Blair had wrapped days of meetings in Brussels on future support for Ukraine and the NATO alliance.

There was much more on the national-security radar that day. HMCS Charlottetown was departing Halifax to join a NATO mission in the Mediterranean Sea aimed at containing Russian aggression. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was waking up in Italy at the tail end of a G7 summit, then travelling to Switzerland for meetings on Ukraine that included Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

In a lot of workplaces, especially on a weekend, an email outage wouldn’t be much more than an inconvenience. As an after-action report would acknowledge to deputy minister Stefanie Beck (who had been in the job less than two weeks when the outage happened), technology failures at National Defence can “have life-threatening consequences.”

Within half an hour of Sheehan’s support call, the military’s central Defence Service Operations Centre had similar reports from bases in Esquimalt, B.C.; Winnipeg; Trenton, Ont.; and from “deployed operations”—meaning military members in the field, which at the time included navy patrols in the Pacific and the battle group in Latvia.

Restoring the service would take more than eight hours, said the report to Beck, a copy of which The Logic obtained through an access-to-information request. The cause: a tech team that set out to replace switches in the department’s network without realizing all the important things it was connected to.

The internal report did not say that breaking the department’s mobile email services led to catastrophe, but the outage, its duration and the lurching response show the perilous condition of even the Canadian government’s most critical technology systems.

Email is the key medium of electronic communication in the Department of National Defence (DND), a former deputy minister told The Logic, including for urgent warnings and instructions to proceed with (or hold off on) some actions.

“A large portion of the workforce is not at a desk and communication is via iPhone,” Jody Thomas said in a written exchange. “There are circumstances where it’s critical and is life endangering if communication is affected by an outage.

Thomas was the top civilian in the defence bureaucracy for four years, until March 2022, and went on to be Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security adviser before retiring in January.

The department has fallbacks, but “it’s always preferable if we have the main channel functional,” she wrote.

Also knocked out, according to the report to Beck: the mechanism for reporting technical problems electronically, and part of a resources-management database.

The technical foul-up was compounded by an organizational one, the report said. Although some senior people encountered the email problem for themselves and contacted the department’s technical help desk, nobody sent an alert up the chain to the generals, admirals and top civilians in the department.

“Given the broad and significant impact of this incident, an early assessment should have triggered a proactive escalation to raise awareness for senior leadership,” the report said.

The jargon-heavy document blamed the outage on two factors: antiquated technology and the failure of the government’s central technology outfit, Shared Services Canada (SSC), to recognize how all the ramshackle pieces fit together.

“The DND/CAF IT infrastructure is the most complex within the government of Canada,” the report said. “Instabilities resulting from constant changes within this environment, which has a significant number of legacy components and is under shared ownership between SSC and DND, can be expected.”

In this case, Shared Services had gone in to replace some gear, and instead of the brief outages in less important systems that it had warned about and received approval for—a few minutes at a time, sprinkled across four hours—the work took out mobile email for the day.

Answering questions from The Logic, the agency agreed with the essence of the Defence Department’s account. Obsolete switches needed to be replaced and Shared Services and National Defence agreed on the plan for it, spokesperson Jean-Pierre Potvin wrote in an email, but things went wrong in the execution.

“The switch replacement encountered issues which resulted in the loss of connection to three email servers for mobile devices,” he wrote.

Doing a better job of tracing the ways different parts of the National Defence systems depend on one another before disconnecting any of them is important, DND’s report said, but the real solution is a major overhaul of the old gear.

Shared Services agrees with that, too, Potvin wrote to The Logic. The government needs new gear to handle demands from new technology like artificial intelligence, he wrote. Meanwhile: “The financial, operational, and cybersecurity impacts of maintaining aging systems are diverting resources that would be better used for modernization work.”