In an unexpected turn of events, Singtel experienced a major disruption in its fixed voice services today.
The incident, which lasted for more than three hours, affected landlines across the island, while mobile and broadband services remained unaffected.
The disruption began around 2 PM and services started to be progressively restored between 6 PM and 7 PM.
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Some of us might not have used a landline for years, but they still serve very important functions.
Like, for example, emergency services.
Here’s how it affected us.
Emergency Services Impacted
One of the most significant consequences of the disruption was its impact on emergency hotlines. Both the 995 (Singapore Civil Defence Force) and 999 (Singapore Police Force) numbers were affected.
As a temporary measure, the public was advised to send SMS to 70995 for SCDF or 70999 for SPF in case of emergencies.
Both SCDF and SPF announced that the disruption to their hotlines had been resolved by 7 PM.
Healthcare and Banking Sectors Affected Several healthcare institutions also reported issues with their phone lines.
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KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital reported that all their phone lines were down, while Changi General Hospital experienced “technical issues” with their telephone lines. SingHealth’s telephone appointment lines were temporarily unavailable as well.
Major banks in Singapore, including DBS Bank, UOB, and Standard Chartered, faced disruptions to their customer care hotlines due to the “telco service disruption.” Some businesses even reported issues with their payment terminals.
Singtel’s Response and Investigation
At the peak of the disruption, over 2,700 reports were filed on the outage tracking website Downdetector, highlighting the scale of the incident.
Throughout the incident, Singtel provided updates on the situation. At 3:30 PM, the company confirmed that some customers were experiencing intermittent fixed voice service issues. By 5:07 PM, Singtel announced that their engineers had isolated the problem and were implementing recovery measures.
The company apologized for the inconvenience caused and emphasized that mobile and broadband services remained unaffected.
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In a statement, Singtel clarified that there was no evidence to suggest that the disruption was a cyber-related event, adding that it was an “isolated incident”. The cause of the issue remains unknown at this time.
The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has stated that they take a serious view of any service disruption to public telecommunications services and will investigate the incident.
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