Yesterday wasn’t a good day for some people.
And by some people, I meant Starhub customers.
Our Dependence On Home Internet Services
Pre-Covid-19, our home internet services aren’t essential services.
It’s great to have them but our main money-making ability comes from the company’s broadband services.
But with the circuit breaker measures kicking in, most of us are now working from home (WFH) and our home internet services are now our rice bowls.
Which is why when Starhub went down on 15 Apr 2020, people went crazy.
Classes Couldn’t Be Attended, Meetings Were Abruptly Delayed
At 11am, Starhub internet services went down. And it was “fully restored” at 8.20pm, according to Starhub.
@StarHub Why was my home broadband service down for a good 20 minutes between 11:00 and 11:25 am today ? I see many users have reported the same issue. I restarted my modem and router. It did not work for 10 minutes after restarting and then suddenly resumed. Provide root cause. pic.twitter.com/vwS61okYa7
— Debashis Ghosh (@Deb_a_Ghosh) April 15, 2020
A meeting was suddenly shut down.
Was hosting a 70+ person @zoom_us meeting and my ISP @StarHub was down for a good 10 minutes, @StarHubCares + @IMDAsg , please investigate.
— Z (@_zzaaccc) April 15, 2020
Help could not be reached.
@StarHub hi starhub! Is your internet down? No one’s picking up the hotline – urgent working from home!
— rostoss (@rostoss1) April 15, 2020
It Wasn’t A Cyber Attack
Starhub has said in a statement that the downtime was due to a “network issue” with one of their “Domain Name Servers (DNS)” which handles internet traffic routing.
There was no evidence of a cyber attack, they assured.
Starhub’s chief technology officer (CTO) Chong Siew Loong apologised to customers, confirming that the incident was due to a network issue with one of Starhub’s DNS.
It was added that the downtime only affected home broadband services.
“Enterprise customers were not affected.”
We Can Handle The Traffic, No Worries
He assures that they have the capacity to handle the additional traffic required for customers who are working or studying from home.
“Traffic on our network is well below our available capacity and ample redundancy has been built into our network to cater for high service levels to be delivered consistently.”
As for this incident, Starhub will take it seriously and investigate properly, so that there won’t be a second time.
“We take this incident seriously and will conduct a detailed root cause analysis so that we can prevent future recurrence.”
Bandwidth allocation isn’t a new issue. Previously, Netflix lowered the resolution of their videos in Europe for 30 days so additional bandwidth can be allocated for Home-Based Learning (HBL) and WFH.
But at least, one thing for sure, from this incident, we’ve learnt that despite not being able to go to the office or school, (some) people are still working hard from their homes.
Here’s a simplified summary of the South Korea martial law that even a 5-year-old would understand:
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