IMDA ‘Buay Song’ StarHub Disruption During Circuit Breaker Period & Might Take Enforcement Action

By
Shawn Ambrose
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With most residents stuck at home, a solid Internet connection is more important than ever.

I mean, forget working from home, what are we supposed to do with our lives if we can’t have Zoom meetings with our friends or have binge sessions on YouTube?

Reader: You know you can read books, right?

Ha, good one reader. I needed that. 

But seriously, at a time when almost everything we do is online, such a long disruption is almost unforgivable.

IMDA ‘Buay Song’ StarHub Disruption During Circuit Breaker Period & Might Take Enforcement Action

For many residents, yesterday (15 April) was just another Wednesday.

But for Starhub customers, it was a day of trauma and homicidal fury.

You see, our internet connections were… disrupted.

Image: Giphy

And it wasn’t for an hour or so. According to CNA, the disruption began at about 11am and services were only “fully restored” at 8.20pm.

People were not pleased, to say the least. Here’s some footage of an angry mob of Starhub customers on the streets:

Image: Giphy
Image: giphy

And it isn’t just residents who are pissed.

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said on Wednesday (Apr 15) in a Facebook post that it has started investigations into StarHub’s service disruptions.

“IMDA takes a serious view of any service disruption to public telecommunications services, especially during the circuit breaker period, where many of us are working and studying from home,” the authority said.

They added that they would “not hesitate to take strong enforcement action” if there were “any lapses on StarHub’s part”.

Damn, looks like someone did not take too kindly to having their Tiger King marathon disrupted.

Meetings and Students Affected

With schools shifting to home-based learning and adults working from home, Starhub couldn’t have picked a worse time to have network issues.

Some people had to delay their meetings as a result.

And some students were affected as well.

And people couldn’t even escape from this gloomy period of human history by tuning into their favourite streaming service.

StarHub users’ lives were basically on pause yesterday due to the disruption.

So, what caused this long-ass outage?

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A Network Issue

After apologising to customers, StarHub’s chief technology officer Chong Siew Loong explained that the disruption had come about due to a network issue with one of the telco’s Domain Name Servers.

“We take this incident seriously and will conduct a detailed root cause analysis so that we can prevent future recurrence.”

Internet Usage Has Spiked

Even before the circuit breaker period, internet usage had increased dramatically by as much as 60%, according to Internet service providers (ISPs).

This is largely due to the fact that many employees at the time were already working from home.

But now, with most workers and all students working and studying online, a solid internet connection is integral to our daily life.

All StarHub users can do is hope that we don’t have another disruption during this period.

Though we’ve certainly said that before.

Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:

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Shawn Ambrose
Email: [email protected]