Damaged fibre cables at North-South Corridor project caused display of inaccurate bus timings: LTA
Preliminary investigations showed that this affected the bus Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) system which uses the affected fibre service cable, says LTA.
Public buses queue to enter a bus stop. (File photo: Facebook/Land Transport Authority)
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SINGAPORE: Issues of inaccurate bus timings and long wait times being displayed at bus stops and on transport apps on Saturday (Apr 18) were due to damaged fibre network cables that disrupted telco services, said the Land Transport Authority (LTA).
"On Apr 18, 2026, at around 10.40am, fibre service cables were damaged during contiguous bored pile works for the North–South Corridor project," said LTA in response to CNA's query.
"The damage resulted in disruptions to the telco services. Preliminary investigations showed that this affected the bus Expected Time of Arrival (ETA) system which uses the affected fibre service cables."
Construction activity had earlier on Saturday damaged fibre infrastructure, leading to an outage which affected broadband services for around 5,000 users in Ang Mo Kio, Bishan, Sengkang and Punggol.
NetLink Trust, which owns and operates the fibre network infrastructure of Singapore's Nationwide Broadband Network, said on Saturday that it experienced a fibre service outage.
According to preliminary findings from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), a cable cut during construction works led to the disruption.
LTA said in a Facebook post at about 4.30pm that it was investigating "technical issues" that were affecting the ETA system for buses, causing inaccurate bus timings to be displayed.
Bus operations were not affected, and all services continued to operate at their usual frequencies, it said.
"This is not related to previous incidents," the authority told CNA on Saturday evening.
"We are working closely with Singtel and NetLink Trust to assess the damage and implement repairs to the fibre service cables, as well as related services like the ETA system."
The latest incident affecting the ETA system for buses came months after an issue with the ETA system.
In January this year, LTA reset its ETA system after technical issues prevented buses from transmitting location data to a central server, causing inaccurate timings and long wait times to be displayed at electronic displays at bus stops and interchanges, as well as apps like MyTransport.SG, CityMapper and Google.
LTA had said that its engineers and the ETA system contractor identified a "memory cache build-up" in on-board systems, which affected around half of the bus fleet across all operators.
Technicians were required to physically service the affected on-board devices, involving the clearing of memory caches and manually updating the firmware for the transmitters.
The issue, first detected on Jan 10, was fully restored more than a month later on Feb 12.
Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow told parliament last month that financial penalties would be imposed on a third-party vendor over technical issues.
