Technical issues delaying mobile service restoration; no evidence outage is cyber-related: Singtel
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Singtel said at 12.01pm that its engineers had identified the issue and “rectification measures” had been activated.
ST PHOTO: KUA CHEE SIONG
SINGAPORE – Technical issues are causing a delay in the restoration of mobile services, said Singtel, after a disruption on March 16 that has stretched beyond six hours.
The telco added that there is no evidence the outage is a cyber-related event.
Thousands of Singtel customers, including users of its subsidiary and SIM-only GOMO, reported service outage on the morning of March 16.
The Infocomm Media Development Authority said in a media response that it is aware of the disruption to Singtel’s mobile network services which started at 10.30am.
It said: “IMDA takes a serious view of any service disruptions and will investigate this incident.”
There were 827 reports on the outage at about 10.30am, with the number of reports on Downdetector peaking at 5,330 at 11.04am. Downdetector tracks service outage by collating status reports from a number of sources.
At 1.08pm, the number of reports reflected on the live tracker had dropped to 1,276. Later, at 3.20pm, there were close to 450 reports.
Earlier, Singtel said in a Facebook post at 12.01pm that its engineers had identified the issue and “rectification measures” had been activated. It did not state what the issue was.
In a later update at 1.18pm, it said that its services were being progressively restored.
“During restoration, we encountered some technical issues, which has resulted in a delay,” the telco said at 3.28pm.
Singtel acknowledged earlier at 11.12am that some customers might be experiencing issues with their mobile services, and its engineers were investigating the issue. Customers were advised to switch off and on their devices to help restore mobile connectivity.
The company apologised to its customers for any inconvenience caused.
Payment services group NETS in a Facebook post at 12.35pm said the Singtel mobile connectivity issue may impact some transactions on NETS terminals and QR payments, adding that it is working closely with the telco operator to resolve the issue.
Previously, a mobile service outage affected Singtel customers for six hours in November 2025.
And, in October 2024, an unprecedented islandwide disruption involving Singtel’s telecommunications network saw hotlines of the Singapore Civil Defence Force and police, as well as those of hospitals and banks, made unreachable.
The telco operator was fined $1 million over the fixed-line outage incident, which affected 500,000 users for more than four hours.
