Singtel restores mobile service after outage, says no evidence disruption was 'cyber-related' event

SINGAPORE: Singtel said on Monday (Mar 16) evening that it had fully restored mobile services that went down that morning, following a delay caused by "technical issues".

"We'd like to update that 4G and 5G mobile services have been restored," the telco said at 7.09pm, more than eight hours after the start of the disruption.

The telco then said in an update at about 9pm that while all 4G and 5G mobile services had been fully restored, it understood that some customers were still experiencing issues reconnecting to the network.

It advised customers to switch their devices to airplane mode and back, or restart their devices a few times to restore service. 

Singtel earlier said there was no evidence to suggest the incident is a cyber-related event.

In February, Singapore authorities said that all four major telcos were targets of a cyberattack by UNC3886. The attack, which was made public last year, enabled attackers to gain access to a few critical systems of Singtel, M1, StarHub and Simba, but no sensitive customer data was lost.

In response to queries from CNA, the Infocomm Media Development Authority said that it "takes a serious view of any service disruptions and will investigate this incident". The authority said that the service disruption started at 10.30am.

Thousands of Singtel users earlier reported issues with their mobile service on Monday morning, with some unable to pay for items or use their mobile data for work.

The Downdetector website, which tracks outages by collating status reports, showed over 5,300 reports related to Singtel as of 11.07am.

Singtel acknowledged the issue on Facebook at about 11.15am. The post garnered over 150 comments about 20 minutes after it was posted, with customers saying they were unable to use their phone data, Wi-Fi and make voice calls. 

The telco encouraged users to turn off their devices and turn them back on again in order to restore service.

In updates at about 12pm and 1.20pm, Singtel said its engineers had identified the issue and that "rectification measures" had been activated, with services progressively being restored.

However, it later flagged the delay at about 3.30pm, saying that it had encountered "technical issues" during the restoration process.

Announcing that services had been restored about three-and-a-half hours later, Singtel apologised for the inconvenience caused by the disruption and thanked its customers for their patience.

“My wife stuck in supermarket unable to make payment with Apple Pay,” read a Facebook comment. 

Others also reported issues ordering or paying for food, accessing the internet for work and utilising their roaming. 

A Facebook user who identified himself as a private hire driver said he was affected.

"No network, we can't drive," wrote Mr Farees Izzat. 

"I cannot order my Grab food now! Wonder what time will be up? This was down before 11am," wrote another user, Jewel Starry. 

Payment provider NETS said the outage might have affected some transactions on NETS terminals and via QR payments. It said later at about 2pm that the issue was progressively being resolved.

Several users said that they were still unable to use their mobile services after restarting their devices.

"I turned it off/on thrice and still no service," commented one user on Singtel's Facebook post. Another wrote they had been restarting their device for an hour. 

A GOMO user shared in Downdetector’s comment section that they had no network access as well.

A Reddit thread on the Singtel issue also had two commenters saying they had issues with GOMO’s mobile services. However, other comments said they had no problems using the Singtel-subsidiary’s network.

Last year, a service outage caused Singtel customers to lose mobile connectivity. 

The first reports of the outage were recorded at about 3pm on Nov 18, 2025, and Singtel said at about 10pm the same day that mobile connectivity had been restored and services were operating normally.