Singtel CEO apologises for outages, says 9-hour disruption on Mar 16 due to mechanical fault
"This should not have happened," said Singtel Singapore CEO Ng Tian Chong.
Singtel company signage is seen on a building facade at the central business district in Singapore on Mar 14, 2025. (Photo: AFP/Roslan Rahman)
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SINGAPORE: Singtel Singapore CEO Ng Tian Chong on Thursday (Mar 19) apologised for the company's recent outages, and said that the disruption that occurred on the first day - lasting more than nine hours - was due to a "mechanical fault".
Singtel customers had reported connectivity issues on three consecutive days starting from Mar 16.
“We know how important it is to stay connected and recognise the impact these incidents may have had on our customers. This should not have happened. We sincerely apologise," he said.
On Mar 16, about 15 per cent of its customers started having mobile connectivity issues from about 10.30am due to a “mechanical fault” at one of Singtel’s network facilities, said Mr Ng.
According to an investor factsheet, Singtel has 4.5 million mobile customers in Singapore as of end-March last year.
“Though multiple redundancy measures were in place to support seamless service continuity, our situation required reconfiguration which took time to fully take effect.”
He said that 4G services for affected customers were restored by around 1.30pm and 5G services were progressively restored from about 2.45pm.
He added that most affected customers could connect to 5G services within two hours.
“As part of the recovery process, due to device settings, some customers may have needed to restart their devices or needed additional support to reconnect to the network,” said Mr Ng.
He added that full 5G service was restored around 8pm that day.
Separately, on Mar 17, around 2,000 customers faced mobile connectivity issues due to “a software bug from an earlier pre-planned IT system upgrade”.
“This issue was not immediately apparent as it coincided with the earlier incident. Once identified, our teams took immediate action and connectivity was progressively restored, with full restoration completed by around 4pm on the same day,” said Mr Ng.
Following those disruptions, the company carried out some network reconfigurations to "further stabilise and optimise performance”, he said.
During this process, there was a brief spike in network traffic at around 5.30pm on Mar 18. However, he said that this was "swiftly resolved within about an hour".
He added that these events were unrelated to one another.
“We are committed to learning from these events and working with our vendors to further enhance our network resilience and improve recovery times,” said Mr Ng.
