M1 offers free calls as compensation for its latest service outage

Mobile operator M1 will be offering all postpaid customers three days of free local mobile calls, SMS, MMS and data services as compensation for its latest service breakdown. Prepaid customers will get a $1 bonus for every top-up of $17 and above, during the month of February.

The free services will be available over the Chinese New Year weekend of Feb 10 to 12. In a statement Friday evening, M1 said it wanted to express its sincere appreciation to the affected customers for their patience and understanding.

Its services affected by an outage were restored at about 7pm Thursday. With services disrupted for a total of 64 hours, it is likely to have been the worst mobile network failure Singapore has experienced to date.

M1's mobile disruption started at 3am on Tuesday when one of its vendors was upgrading transmission equipment at its network headquarters in the International Business Park. This caused a power problem which set off gas suppression and water sprinkler systems. One of the telco's mobile network switches then tripped, causing service to be disrupted.

While the failed switch deprived customers in the south-western part of Singapore 3G services, they were still able to connect to 2G services.

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