Everything About M1’s Disruption & Rebate: It Was Caused By a ‘Network Bolstering Initiative’

Lest you didn’t know, some M1 customers starved for about two days, from 12 May 2020 at 6am all the way to the next afternoon at about 2pm.

Thankfully, we humans can survive for almost three weeks without food, so no one died.

We all know how important the Internet is now, so the next question is: What happened?

Here’s M1’s response:

Network Bolstering Initiative

M1 has responded to the incident, and confirmed that it was actually two separate incidents.

The first occurred on 12 May 2020 morning, and according to M1, they’d need to do some maintenance in the wee hours of 13 May 2020 to restore the system fully. And so, on 6am that day, they announced that everything’s back to normal, and M1 customers should be able to breathe again.

Except it didn’t.

At 10:30am, they then said that “some” customers are still facing issue and they were looking into it.

By 2pm, all services were restored, and thankfully, this time, M1 customers’ earth started to spin again.

The orange telco said that the incident was “triggered by a network bolstering initiative to improve customer experience.”

Oh.

With the mention of a sudden maintenance, people wondered they could’ve been using a 56k modem in their network, but they’ve come out to clarify that the “disruptions were not caused by any dated equipment, shortage of capacity or cyber-attack.”

The Rebate M1 Customers Have Been Waiting For

StarHub gave a 20% discount, which is equivalent to six days, for the next month’s bill after they suffered a downtime for about half a day (from 11am to 8:20pm) on 15 April 2020. Back then, the issue was due to an “internal network change management process.”

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So if my maths is correct, M1 customers should be look at more than 50% discount, no?

No.

All M1 users affected by this disruption will be offered a one-time one-week rebate on their Home Broadband monthly fee. To avail the rebate, users will be redirected to a simple one-click link via SMS and email starting today.

One week of a month is…25%.

I can almost hear the laughter of people who use the green telco.

The CEO of M1 said, “We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience the disruption has caused to our users and thank them for their patience and understanding. Our priority now is to ensure service reliability and we are taking extra measures to prevent recurrence of such incidents. We are also cooperating fully with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) for further investigations.”

So far, both disruptions have happened in the middle of the month.

Would we see a disruption in the middle of June for the red telco users?

By the way, lest you didn’t know, M1 is now a subsidiary of Keppel Corporation, and it’s owned primarily by both Keppel Corporation and SPH after the two giants bought over 90% of the orange telco last year.

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