SINGAPORE - Some Singtel users had trouble accessing the Internet in the wee hours of Saturday (Aug 26) as planned maintenance took longer than expected, the telco said.

"Due to planned maintenance of our servers, some of our customers may have had difficulty accessing the Internet between 2.15am and 2.55am earlier this morning," a Singtel spokesman told The Straits Times on Saturday.

"We apologise for the maintenance taking longer than the typical 15 minutes," she said.

Singtel added that it plans its maintenance at such hours as "there are fewer users on the network and a smaller number of users will be impacted".

"All services have since been back to normal," said the Singtel spokesman.

Several Singtel users had taken to social media to ask for an explanation of what happened.

Facebook user Dean Kng wrote: "There was no Internet connection again... In this incident, the least you can do is to keep your customers informed. Such corrective controls should be part of your response and recovery plan."

Axel Lim wrote: "Why was the Internet down from 2.30am onwards?"

Facebook user Angie Seow wrote on Singtel's Facebook page at 2.20am saying that both her broadband and 4G Internet were down.

She said she did not try connecting to the Internet after 3am, but could use the Internet at 10am when she woke up.

Facebook user Derrick Tan said that his Internet was still not working shortly after noon on Saturday.

However, Singtel said the network was back up after the planned maintenance.

Singtel did not issue an official note on their website or social media platforms.

However, from noon, it began giving the following response in comments on its Facebook page: "Hi all, we would like to share that due to a planned maintenance of our servers, some of our customers may have had difficulty accessing the internet for a brief period in the early hours of the morning. It was temporary and all services have since been back to normal. We apologise for the inconvenience caused."

In response to queries from The Straits Times, Singtel thanked its customers for their patience and apologised again for the inconvenience caused.

Singtel did not comment on whether the outage was islandwide and how many users were affected.