Online disruption hits businesses across Singapore
Users unable to access business fibre broadband network; telco apologises for service interruption
For about an hour yesterday morning, social media was rife with complaints about outages that affected businesses island-wide, including hundreds of AirAsia passengers at Changi Airport Terminal 4 (T4).
Singtel's Facebook page received many posts and comments complaining about office and business broadband connections going down.
A post by Kenneth Tan garnered comments from other users who said that they were not able to access Singtel's business fibre broadband network at offices across the island, including Marsiling, Outram, Jurong, Tai Seng and the Central Business District.
In response to queries from The New Paper, a Singtel spokesman said some of its business customers had difficulties accessing the Internet at around 9.30am and that its engineers had resolved the issue and restored all affected services by 10.55am.
"We apologise for the inconvenience caused to some of our business customers due to a network connection issue (yesterday) morning... We are sorry for the service disruption," the spokesman said.
Project manager Adrienne Lim, who works in Tanjong Pagar, told TNP that the Internet connection at her office cut off abruptly during a meeting at around 9.40am before being restored about an hour later.
Ms Lim, 30, said Singtel staff did call to help troubleshoot the problem but to no avail, and the lack of updates during the outage was frustrating.
"They did not give any indication of what time the Internet would be coming back, so we were just waiting," she said.
According to Downdetector.sg, which tracks online service interruptions and outages, users started to flag the issue at 9.50am, with a peak of 783 reports at 10.30am.
AIRASIA
At around the time yesterday, passengers scheduled to take AirAsia flights from T4 were also affected when a system outage disrupted check-in systems there.
Pictures on social media showed long lines forming at the check-in counters and automated self check-in machines displaying "out of service" error messages.
An AirAsia spokesman told TNP that the system outage had affected its check-in systems at T4 for about 1½ hours, from 9.41am to 11.15am, causing 10 flights to be delayed.
During that time, AirAsia was able to continue checking in passengers manually, the spokesman said.
"Our systems are now back up and running, and we have resumed automated check-in of our guests.
"We are currently investigating the cause of the outage, and we apologise for any inconvenience caused to our guests," the spokesman added.
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