On October 6, 2011, starting around 06:30 EST a "technical" anomaly caused the satellite to point away from the Earth causing an outage in Internet, telephone and bank machine connectivity throughout much of Canada's northern areas. The outage also affected flights in the region. Some hospitals in Québec reported an outage in their communications systems as a result of the satellite outage. The anomaly was caused when the satellite did not respond well to a software update. As it failed, it turned away from the Earth and positioned itself towards the Sun in order to keep critical systems running. This was Anik F2's first outage. The event caused the Canadian military's research arm, Defence Research and Development Canada, to start considering satellites as critical infrastructure systems and to invest in research to develop innovations that will help protect Canadian satellites from failures.