Singtel has been fined S$1 million over mobile service disruptions on 16, 18 and 19 March 2026 that affected about 720,000 consumer and business subscribers.
The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) announced the penalty on Tuesday (20 October), saying the incidents were within Singtel’s control to prevent.
Cooling Failure Caused Equipment To Shut Down
CNA reported that IMDA’s investigation traced the 16 March outage to a failed cooling system at a Singtel exchange, where mobile network equipment overheated and shut down.
A vendor had failed to reopen a manual valve controlling water flow after scheduled maintenance. Singtel also lacked active monitoring of the valves or water flow.
The later disruptions followed the diversion of 5G traffic to another exchange. Increased traffic, a disabled network packet optimiser and a software bug caused intermittent connectivity on the evenings of 18 and 19 March.
A packet optimiser helps direct data through the network efficiently.
IMDA found that better cooling-system monitoring could have prevented the first incident. Singtel should also have checked more carefully that the other exchange could handle the additional traffic.
Singtel Accepts Penalty
Responding to CNA, Ng Tian Chong said Singtel accepted the ruling and penalty, and regretted the inconvenience caused.
In deciding the penalty, IMDA considered the disruptions’ scale, Singtel’s cooperation and recovery efforts, and about S$8 million in goodwill rebates.
Singtel has since improved cooling-system maintenance and monitoring, rectified systems at the other exchange and conducted exercises to test traffic switching during failures, IMDA said.
