SINGAPORE – Government e-services that experienced outages in 2021 clocked a median total of four hours in downtime, and affected users less than 0.1 per cent of the time.
Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information Janil Puthucheary cited these figures in Parliament on Tuesday, calling it the “cumulative downtime” for each affected service.
He was responding to a query by Mr Shawn Huang (Jurong GRC) on the measures to ensure the availability and resilience of government services amid increased digitalisation.
Mr Huang also asked what alternatives are available to the public to access critical services when there is a sustained system outage.
Dr Janil said the median cumulative downtime among affected government digital services for the whole of 2021 was four hours.
“This is partly because the majority of government systems providing services to the public have been moved to commercial cloud hosting platforms that have high availability,” said Dr Janil.
These platforms that host national services are designed specifically to host many users, he added.
Unlike traditional hosting platforms, commercial cloud hosting platforms are not deployed on a single server but a network of virtual and physical cloud servers to host apps or websites. This allows more people to use the services while ensuring greater flexibility.
The Government has also put in place backup hardware and monitoring tools to detect when a system is not in service, said Dr Janil.
“When a system goes down, we seek to detect the outage quickly and recover service availability fast, while mitigating the impact of the outage,” he said.
Citizens can also make critical transactions offline in person or over the phone, he said.
The use of commercial cloud hosting platforms is part of the Government’s goal to shift 70 per cent of eligible national services to the cloud by 2023. The Government Technology Agency (GovTech) said in June that more than 800 government systems – at least half of the total – are being hosted on the Government Commercial Cloud service.
The service allows government agencies to adopt commercially available cloud solutions for their services. Doing so has helped the Government’s digital infrastructure become more agile and resilient, while cutting costs of up to 40 per cent for each system put on the cloud, said GovTech at the time.
Dr Janil was also asked how many cases of IT system outages have occurred at local public healthcare institutions and what measures are being taken to ensure the secure roll-out of healthcare apps.
Dr Janil, who is also the Senior Minister of State for Health, said that the Government will continue to review how its systems can be strengthened to reduce disruptions.
Public healthcare institutions have contingency plans that will go live when key applications are unavailable, to allow patients to be served, he added.
He gave an instance of a contingency scenario: “For example, users would be able to view a patient’s historical clinical information, but may not be able to enter new clinical information into the system.
“Patients should contact their healthcare provider for medical assistance as needed.”
System outages can cause delays to important matters. On Aug 27, some patients had their medical appointments delayed when network hardware issues caused a system outage at some polyclinics.
On Nov 15, some Singpass users were unable to check their Central Provident Fund balances and access other apps through the national authentication app for roughly an hour.
Clarification note: An earlier version of the story said that outages of national digital services typically lasted around four hours each in 2021. The Smart Nation and Digital Government Office has clarified that four hours is the median total downtime for each service, not each outage.
