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An outage of fiber broadband at telecommunications company M1 lasted 33 hours, affecting subscribers during this period, when many work and study from home, prompting a severe warning from the industry regulator.
In a statement yesterday, regulator Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said it has begun investigations and that “it would not hesitate to take firm compliance measures if there were failures by M1.”
“IMDA has a serious vision of any interruption of service to public telecommunications, especially during the circuit interruption period where many work and study from home,” said an IMDA spokesperson.
Yesterday, many subscribers continued to face Internet connection problems even after the telecom company said services had been restored early in the morning.
The service was fully restored only around 2 p.m.
“We have rectified a network problem that affected fiber broadband Internet traffic service,” the telecommunications company said on its Facebook page. He did not specify what the problem was and did not respond to queries from The Straits Times.
To reconnect to their fiber broadband services, users were told to turn their optical network terminals and routers off and on, which many did.
The disruption affected thousands of subscribers in various parts of Singapore, including Sengkang, Upper Thomson, Hougang, and Sembawang, and underscores the importance of having a backup network.
Technology consultant Larry Leong, 52, said he buys from two Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to mitigate the risk of service providers having equipment problems.
“Subscribing to two different 500Mbps networks is cheaper and offers more redundancy than buying a 1Gbps connection to an ISP,” said Leong.
Psychological problems
Retired Tan Lye Han, 64, who lives in Ang Mo Kio, said the interruption created psychological problems for her.
Her son, Mr. Kevin Ong, 29, has special needs and has been feeling anxious at home amidst the circuit breaker measures.
[[nid:488017]]“Usually (he connects to the Internet) to keep himself busy with shows and movies, and I also connect to the Internet to read to him and teach him spelling. He’s been very upset and restless without the Internet for more than 24 hours.
Others were upset that they couldn’t get help through the M1 hotline.
Andrew Koh, 38, who works in the airline industry, said: “I was unable to contact M1 on his hotline or on Facebook.
“I got to IMDA, but all they could tell me was that they are also chasing M1.”
Last month, two network outages on the same day affected thousands of StarHub subscribers and were attributed to network equipment failure and a domain name server problem.
