Singtel landline outage: Backup system did not work as intended after ‘technical issue’

SINGAPORE: Singtel landline outage lasted for hours Citing preliminary findings, Janil Puthucheary, Senior Minister of State at the Ministry of Digital Development and Information, said on Monday (November 11) that the incident, which occurred last month, was caused by a “technical issue” in a network component.

The backup system did not activate as desired.

Speaking in Parliament, Dr Janil said preliminary findings showed that the technical issue affected the proper functioning of the network component in one of the two systems supporting Singtel’s fixed-line voice service.

He said the two systems, housed in separate telephone exchanges, are designed to immediately take over the full load of the other when one system fails.

“However, in this case, the failover did not occur smoothly, resulting in intermittent service outage,” he explained.

The Singtel landline outage on October 8 led to disruption in calls to emergency services, healthcare facilities and customer service lines for some government agencies, banks and businesses.

Members of Parliament had submitted many questions on the matter, including what could have caused the outage, how such an incident could be prevented in the future and whether any action would be taken against Singtel.

Dr Janil said there was no evidence to suggest that the incident was related to sabotage or a cyber attack, adding that the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) was continuing its investigations.

“The telecommunications network in Singapore is an essential infrastructure that supports our nation’s connectivity needs and requirements. IMDA holds key service providers such as Singtel to high service standards and requires them to conduct regular audits of their networks and infrastructure,” he said.

“This includes ensuring the security of the network design, redundancy measures and business continuity plans. Service providers must also ensure that their networks are resilient to outages. IMDA will not hesitate to take strong action, including imposing financial penalties under the Telecommunications Act, if any faults are detected.” “