Sometimes the technology just decides to stop working. We’ve all encountered tech issues in our lives, and most of the time they’re easy to solve. There are occasions though where tech problems are not so easy to solve, and they all seem to happen at the same time. Just such a fluke seemed to happen in Guelph this weekend with the Police, the Fire Department, and major news site (not this one) all affected.

On Sunday, the Guelph Police Service posted a media release explaining an ongoing technical issue with the non-emergency phone line. Members of the public are being asked to call 519-824-1212 extension 7999 if they’re reaching out to police and are “not in an emergency situation and no person or property is in immediate danger.” If you dial the 0 extension, you will encounter the technical difficulty.

This came after the City of Guelph posted on social media on Saturday evening that the Guelph Fire Department communications centre was experiencing technical issues. The administration line, 519-824-3232, was taking longer than usual to connect incoming phone calls to the centre, about 30 or 40 seconds in most cases. The City was advising that anyone calling the administration line be patient while trying to connect the call.

In both cases, people are encouraged to still call 9-1-1 if they’re experiencing an emergency. There had been no reported issues with the City’s emergency services line.

They say these things come in threes, and the third technical difficulty this weekend has been with one of the Guelph’s media outlets. Guelph Today spent most of Saturday offline and was not available again until sometime on Saturday evening.

“Microsoft servers, which play a crucial role in hosting our news websites, faced a widespread outage across Eastern Canada & the U.S. This unexpected disruption began in the early morning hours and affected our ability to deliver the latest local news to you,” Village Media said in a post on Guelph Today. The outage also affected other sites in the Village Media network but it didn’t affect other aspects of their operations.