Fibre Internet outage hits some M1 users in western, central and eastern Singapore

M1 said its engineers are "working hard to resolve the issue". ST PHOTO: KELVIN CHNG

SINGAPORE - Thousands of M1 fibre broadband users around Singapore were left without Internet access for more than 10 hours on Tuesday (May 12) during a time when subscribers need to work and study from home amid the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak.

M1's disruption, which comes one month after StarHub's intermittent outage, was still not resolved as at 2.30pm.

According to the Down Detector website, which logs Internet outages, M1 started having problems at around 4.27am, before complaints spiked at 7.27am with 1,185 reports, and again, at 8.42am with 1,432 reports.

On its Facebook page, M1 first reported the problem at 8am noting that customers in some areas in the western, central and eastern parts of Singapore were affected, and that its engineers were "working hard to resolve the issue".

Many netizens said that northern Singapore was affected as well.

In another update at 11am, the telco said it had identified that "only a specific group of customers" were experiencing the disruptions. It did not elaborate further.

Accounts officer Carol Tan, who lives in Jurong West St 61, was still waiting for her fibre broadband connection to resume more than four hours after it first stopped working at about 7.45am.

"It's quite hard for us without broadband as we are all heavy (Internet) users. My husband and I are deaf, and we rely on the Internet a lot to update ourselves on what's happening outside," said the 45-year-old, who has two teenage children.

"My son also has an online class soon and we will have to see what happens."

Mr Lim Jing Hong, who works in financial services, told the Straits Times that he normally starts work at around 7am and could not get his connection to work at 6.55am.

The 32-year-old, who lives in Marsiling, said: "I could not verify if it was my router, personal connection, or M1's connection that was having problems... I only verified after getting through the hotline more than 30 minutes later. I thought communications (from the telco) were severely lacking.

"I missed morning meetings today, (and) had to arrange for other colleagues to cover my duties."

Last month, two network service disruptions on the same day affected thousands of StarHub subscribers, and were attributed to network equipment failure and a domain name server issue respectively.

Addressing the issue of network capacity in Parliament last week, Communications and Information Minister S. Iswaran said Internet usage in Singapore remains well within network operators' capacity despite a spike in traffic during the circuit breaker period.

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