Singtel fined S$1 million over March mobile outages hitting 720,000 subscribers
Singapore's IMDA has penalised Singtel after a chiller failure and a follow-on traffic overload disrupted mobile service on three days in March. The regulator found the outages were preventable.
Singtel has been hit with a S$1 million penalty by Singapore's telecoms regulator for a run of mobile disruptions in March that reached around 720,000 consumer and business subscribers. In a statement on Tuesday (Oct 20), the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said its investigations concluded that the outages on Mar 16, 18 and 19 were preventable and within the telco's control.
The first outage, on Mar 16, began with a chiller failure at one of Singtel's exchanges, which led mobile network equipment to overheat and switch off, IMDA found. A vendor working on scheduled maintenance had not followed standard operating procedures to reopen a manual valve controlling water flow. Singtel was also not actively monitoring those valves or the water flow to the chiller.
Once 5G traffic was moved to a different Singtel exchange after that incident, further outages followed on Mar 18 and 19. A disabled network packet optimiser and a software bug at the second exchange, together with the higher load, left some subscribers with patchy connectivity in the evenings of both days. IMDA said better monitoring of chiller operations, and ensuring the second exchange could cope with the extra traffic, would have averted the incidents. The regulator ruled out a cyberattack.
IMDA said it weighed the "significant" scale and impact of the outages against Singtel's "full cooperation" with investigations and its progressive restoration of services. Singtel brought 4G back first and then restored 5G in stages. Affected subscribers were given goodwill rebates of S$5 to S$10, which came to about S$8 million across consumer and business customers. Since then, the company has tightened its maintenance and chiller monitoring, corrected the problems at the second exchange and carried out failover exercises.
The regulator said it "will not hesitate to take strong action under the Telecommunications Act, including imposing financial penalties, should any lapses be identified". It added that providers must plan, design and run resilient networks and have measures for quick recovery with minimal inconvenience to users.
The penalty arrives while Singtel's Australian subsidiary Optus is under scrutiny over network reliability following outages that disrupted emergency calls. In September, Optus apologised for a 76-minute outage that affected calls to emergency services in parts of Australia. Singtel shares closed S$0.05, or 1.2 per cent, higher at S$4.23 on Tuesday.