[ad_1]
SINGAPORE – Telco M1 said the island-wide outages to its fiber broadband service that started Tuesday and lasted more than 33 hours were due to a “network strengthening initiative to improve the customer experience”, and no to the shortage of network capacity.
In a statement Thursday (May 14), M1 apologized for the inconvenience caused to customers.
It also offered a one-week discount on monthly home broadband rates to affected users, some of whom worked from home during the circuit breaker period.
M1 said the outages actually comprised two unrelated incidents on Tuesday and Wednesday, and dismissed suggestions of outdated equipment and a cyber attack.
However, he did not elaborate on the nature of the problem caused by his network reinforcement initiative.
“The first incident on May 12 impacted a specific group of customers and was resolved overnight to avoid large-scale disruptions at peak hours,” said an M1 spokesperson.
“The second unrelated incident occurred the following morning and was resolved at 2 p.m. the same day.”
Affected users will receive a link to redeem the refund by SMS and email starting Thursday.
Connectivity issues were first reported on the Downdetector website, which records internet outages, at 4:30 am Tuesday morning.
The disruption affected thousands of subscribers in various parts of Singapore, including Sengkang, Upper Thomson, Hougang, and Sembawang.
“We deeply regret the inconvenience the disruption has caused to our users and we appreciate your patience and understanding.
“Our priority now is to ensure the reliability of the service and we are taking additional measures to avoid the recurrence of such incidents,” said M1 Executive Director Manjot Singh Mann.
“We are also fully cooperating with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) for future investigations.”
IMDA said Wednesday that it has begun investigations and would “not hesitate to take firm action to enforce the law if there were failures by M1.”
M1 is the second telecommunications company affected by network service interruptions since the breaker period began.
Last month, two outages on the same day affected thousands of StarHub subscribers and were attributed to the network equipment failure and a domain name server problem.
[ad_2]
