Telcos, banks, chat apps among online services experiencing temporary spike in disruptions
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Among the services that saw reports of disruptions on Downdetector were Singtel, Starhub, M1, Discord and WhatsApp.
PHOTO: ST FILE
SINGAPORE – Users reported disruptions in a slew of internet-based services in the afternoon on March 23, with telco Singtel experiencing the largest temporary spike.
Among the services that had reports of disruptions on Downdetector, which tracks service outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, were StarHub, M1, Discord and WhatsApp.
Reports about these services spiked at around 3.40pm and fell within 15 minutes.
Singtel reached a peak of over 9,800 reports at 3.42pm, compared with a baseline of five.
Half the reports related to Singtel were for broadband internet issues and 29 per cent were about mobile internet problems.
At almost 4pm, the number of reports concerning Singtel plunged to around 1,700.
“Our checks indicate an international traffic optimisation issue which was resolved within 15 minutes. Our local network remains stable and is operating as expected,” Singtel said on Facebook in an update at 5.23pm.
The telco faced several service disruptions last week, including an eight-hour outage on March 16 which disrupted essential services in Singapore, including payments, ride-hailing and food delivery services.
In the Facebook post, Singtel said it has since addressed all the underlying issues and “vigorously further tested our network over the past three days to ensure stability”.
The temporary spike in disruptions on the afternoon of March 23, however, was a “different issue impacting some customers”, the telco said.
In a media reply, Mr Aaron Ang, chief technology officer of Singapore-based cybersecurity company Cyber Leaders Nexus, likened the situation to a temporary traffic jam on the internet.
He said that many services used in Singapore are hosted overseas in the US, Europe or regional data centres.
“Think of the internet like a global highway system. Traffic optimisation systems are like GPS navigation that automatically pick the fastest route,” Mr Ang added.
“If there’s an optimisation issue, the system may send traffic through slower, congested or broken routes. This causes delays, timeouts or temporary service disruptions.”
As multiple industries, including telcos, banks and chat apps rely on the same global internet pathways, a routing issue can cause these services to be affected at the same time, he said.
Apart from Singtel, reports of disruptions of other services peaked at numbers between 50 and over 100, up from the usual numbers of two to three.
Mr Ang said such optimisation issues could be caused by misconfiguration or software errors, congestion due to sudden traffic spike, cable or infrastructure issues, routing system failures or back-up systems not working properly.
“However, telcos design networks with redundancy and back-ups. Regulators require high reliability standards, so while disruptions may still occur, they are usually short-lived and contained,” he said.
