Janil Puthucheary on Singtel landline outage

The Singtel landline outage on Oct 8 appears to have been caused by a technical issue that affected the proper functioning of a network component in one of two systems supporting the telco’s fixed-line voice services. The two systems, located in separate telephone exchanges, are designed to immediately take over the full load of the other system when one system malfunctions. However, this failover did not happen seamlessly, causing intermittent service disruption. Some public services, including the 999 and 995 emergency hotlines, were affected, along with healthcare organisations, companies and homes. About half of calls could still be connected and all services were progressively restored within four hours. Giving details in Parliament on Monday (Nov 11), Senior Minister of State for Digital Development and Information Janil Puthucheary said the Infocomm Media Development Authority is continuing its investigations and will not hesitate to take strong action, including imposing financial penalties, if lapses are identified. It is also working with the Ministry of Home Affairs, Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) and Singapore Police Force to conduct a comprehensive review of the availability of emergency hotlines when disruptions occur. On that point, Minister of State for Home Affairs Sun Xueling told the House that additional resiliency measures are being evaluated, including “the feasibility of telco diversity” for emergency hotlines. During the Singtel outage, she said the public was given SMS numbers to contact SCDF and the police, and could also do so via the SGSecure app. She said there was no public feedback on any failure by SCDF or the police to respond to urgent or life-threatening incidents during the October disruption.