Local telco provider, Singtel shared that 80% of its fibre broadband services have been restored as of 7 am on Sunday, and its engineers estimate that full service restoration will be achieved in the next few hours.
The company will provide further updates when restoration is complete.
While many has posted on the Singtel’s Facebook page that their services have returned, there are a number of customers around the island, such as Woodlands, Punggol, Ang Mo Kio, Jurong and etc whom have voiced their concerns.
Earlier yesterday morning (3 December), Singtel announced that some of their customers may be experiencing difficulties accessing their Fibre Broadband services and their engineers are working to resolve the problem.
However, it turned out that service disruption was not limited to a few customers but islandwide, both residential and business customers.
“Please bear with us as we try to resolve the problem,” it said.
It wrote on its Facebook page that it is investigating the cause of the failure of its servers to assign IP address to its customers, “We are currently still investigating why our servers cannot assign IP addresses to our customers’ modems to enable broadband connectivity. So far, while we have ascertained that the service disruption is not due to a DDoS attack, we are not ruling out other plausible causes,”
SingTel also said that it would be working with its vendors throughout the evening and overnight to isolate the problem and get the broadband services up and running again.
To allow customers to cope with the service disruption, Singtel will waive mobile data charges for its customers.
But customers who were using mobile services from other service providers asked how would that apply to them.
Even for customers who were using the services from Singtel, asked how would Singtel guarantee that mobile data charges would be waived.
One such customer, Helen Low wrote on Singtel’s Facebook page, “I am one of the customer that affected so I thought they give free data but to my surprise they SMS alert me that I have already used up to 90% of my data as at 23.43 (yesterday) Why like that?”
Some noted that the notification is to inform users of the data used, and the waiver would be made during the next billing cycle. However, there is no clarification by Singtel on this matter.
As an indication of how people were bothered by the disruption, the Facebook post by Singtel made on Saturday, 9.43am were shared over 7.5k times and there were well over 33k comments posted on the thread.
In 2014, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) issued a record S$6 million fine to SingTel after a fire at a SingTel Bukit Panjang facility caused a breakdown of mobile and broadband services to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. According to its report published in 2014, it has about 574,000 broadband service customers.
