SINGAPORE – Singtel users islandwide experienced an hours-long disruption to their broadband services on Saturday (Dec 3).
In a Facebook post at around 9.45am, the local telco acknowledged that customers may be experiencing difficulties in accessing their fibre broadband services.
“Our engineers are working to resolve the problem,” Singtel added.
However, the situation remained unresolved more than four hours later.
At 11.55am, Singtel said that the fibre broadband service was still down and that engineers were still investigating the cause of the outage. “Please bear with us as we try to resolve the problem. Thank you once again for your patience.”
It subsequently posted an update at 1.30pm, apologising for the disruption and announcing that it was waiving mobile data charges for the day. “As our engineers continue working to resolve our fibre broadband outage issues, we advise affected customers who are also Sintel postpaid mobile subscribers to use their Singtel mobile broadband in the meantime. We will waive their Singtel mobile data charges for today,” the telco wrote on Facebook
The post has attracted close to 7,000 comments, many of which were from users saying that the service in their areas was still down. Affected areas included Woodlands, Telok Blangah, Yishun, Jurong East and Tampines.
Netizens also took to Twitter, with a number expressing frustration after the disruption had caused them to exceed their mobile data limits.
In 2014, an hour-long fire at Singtel’s Bukit Panjang exchange took down Internet connections in northern and western Singapore, affecting 270,000 subscribers, including businesses, for up to eight days. The telco was fined a record $6 million for the incident.
More recently, it was fined a total of $145,000 for two pay-TV disruptions in October 2015 and January 2016.
seanyap@sph.com.sg
