8 Facts About the Singtel Outage ‘Coz Singtel Users Now Got Freebie on Nov 2018

If you’re a Singtel user like me, this would be you on Thursday night:

And if you’re not at home that night, this would be you:

Chances are, more people slept early that night because there’s no life if there’s no Internet. With almost 50% of users in Singapore subscribed to Singtel in Singapore, you can imagine how many people were affected.

Which is why Singtel is going to provide free mobile data for a day in November. But first thing first: what happened?

Outage Occurred Between Thursday 10:00 p.m. to Friday 1:22 a.m.

For that period, Singtel users all over Singapore became disconnected not just from the Internet, but from normal reception (i.e. you know, the one that human beings in the past used to make calls and SMSes?) and life.

According to reports, people who were in one-north, Choa Chu Kang, Ang Mo Kio, Bedok, Serangoon and Kembangan were affected. In another report, people in Jurong, Holland Village and Tampines were affected as well. I can conclude that those were not the only areas affected: Bukit Batok and Woodlands had no reception, too. In other words, it could be the whole of Singapore though it’s not verified.

Problem was due to “power-related issue”

Singtel then updated users, saying that it was due to a “power-related issue”, but that was based on initial investigations. There hasn’t been any further update on this, like whether a cat had tripped their servers or aliens broke into their office to drink the power.

But they’ve decided to make their apology a tangible one when they made this announcement yesterday.

Singtel mobile pre-paid and postpaid users to get one day of local mobile data on 10 November

Lest you’re wondering, 10 November 2018 is a Saturday.

It’s unknown whether one would need to restart the phone to ensure that the data would be free, but if I’m going to stream Netflix on the train on 10 November, it’ll be safer to restart the phone at 12:01 a.m. on that day.

Zero1, a Mobile Virtual Network Operator, Was Down as Well

In case you’re not aware, there has been a few of these virtual network operators operating in Singapore; a popular example would be Circle.Life. These operators use the resources of the three (soon to be four) telcos to sell their plans to end-consumers. For example, Circle.Life uses M1 resources.

Zero1 is one of these MVNOs, and as its partner is Singtel, it was affected, too.

Downdetector is the First Platform to “Report” the Outage

If you’ve read this article, you’d know that downdetector is bae when it comes to outages.

On that night, when I saw that my phone has no reception, my first thought is this: Shit, phone spoilt? I’m pretty sure there were many others who shared the same thought. For people who’s not paid their bills for more than a month, they might just think that their line has been suspended.

It doesn’t help that I could still connect to Wifi, and there hasn’t been any announcement on Singtel’s social media accounts then.

I went to downdetector and ta-da: there’s a spike in reports for Singtel users. It was only a while later that mainstream media and Singtel announced the outage.

Moral of the story? Reading crowd-sourced material is better than waiting for an announcement. #justsaying

Three Months Ago, There Was Another Singtel Outage

On 4 July 2018, between 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m., there was a fibre broadband outage. The issue is related to domain name servers, so it primarily affected web surfing. During that time, NTU students were bidding for their modules so you can imagine the stress.

Singtel has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack. For that outage, there was no freebie, though. But let’s face it: Thursday’s outage was more serious because…

People Stuck in Places, Private Hire Drivers Can’t Work & Buses Were Filled with Snoring Commuters

Unlike a broadband outage, whereby people can still use their mobile data wherever they are, life can still go on normally. For example, on 3 December 2016, when there was a disruption on Singtel broadband, Singtel waived off mobile data charges for Singtel mobile users that day.

However, when mobile data is disrupted, life comes to a…halt. Private hire drivers can’t work, people who depend on private hire cars for commute became stuck in nowhere and smokers who came out for a smoke would be pondering hard about the meaning of life during their smoke break.

The Singtel disruption has disrupted life in general.

And usually, outages affect just the mobile data, but in this case, it’s everything: my phone showed the “For Emergency Calls Only” warning, implying that it’s been rendered useless.

So it’s reasonable that we get one day of free mobile data.

But last time, it was even better leh.

10% Discount Were Given for the December 2016 Outage

The 3 December 2016 outage lasted for almost an entire day and affected Singtel fibre broadband users. As a form of apology, Singtel gave a 10% discount to affected customers’ bills for that month.

Honestly speaking, between 10% off and one day of free mobile data, I would rather go for the 10% discount. After all, if you think about it, the 3.5 hour outage truly disrupted lives.

But hey: who am I to argue. I’m so going to take the train from Joo Koon to Pasir Ris on 10 November just to stream House of Cards Season 6, which is coming out on 2 November 2018.