M1 is under investigation for a service outage that spanned two days and affected residents in several areas across Singapore. The service provider has attributed the cause to “a network issue” that impacted subscribers of its fibre broadband service.
In its first update on May 12 morning, M1 acknowledged on its Facebook page that customers in some areas in the western, central, and eastern parts of the island might be experiencing difficulties with its fibre services. At 6am the next day, it said all fibre services had been fully restored, but revealed some four hours later that some customers were still unable to connect to their broadband service.
It was only past 2pm on May 13, more than 30 hours after the service outage was first noted, that broadband access was fully restored.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday, industry regulator Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said it took “a serious view” of any disruption to public telecommunications services, particularly during the country’s “circuit breaker” period where many were working and studying from home.
In a move to contain the spread of COVID-19, Singapore had introduced a circuit breaker period during which non-essential businesses were forced to close and all of their employees must work from home. Schools also were shut, with students continuing their studies through home-based learning.
IMDA said it had instructed M1 to restore services swiftly and update its subscribers on the progress. The regulator added that its investigation into the service disruption had commenced and “strong enforcement action” would be meted out lapses were found on M1’s part.
The latest incident followed last month’s service disruption that affected StarHub home broadband customers. The operator had to deal with two service disruptions, one of which was triggered by a faulty network equipment while the other was due to a network issue involving a DNS that handled internet traffic routing. Both incidents had occurred on the same day.
IMDA then dished out a similar rebuke for StarHub, stressing the need to maintain robust public telecommunications services during a time where many relied on home connectivity. The regulator also was investigating the operator for the service outage.
M1 had attributed its service disruption to “a network issue”, but provided no further details apart from advising customers to turn off and on their ONT (Optical Network Terminal) and router to restore fibre connection. The service provider had carried out “urgent fibre system maintenance” during the early hours of May 13 in a bid to resolve the issue.
RELATED COVERAGE
Source: Networking - zdnet.com
