SINGAPORE - SingPass and CorpPass suffered intermittent disruption on Thursday (Feb 8) morning, and the national authentication services were taken down in the afternoon for urgent maintenance.
The disruption lasted for about six hours, with services fully restored at around 5.15pm.
This was due to a "server fault" and not a result of any cyber attacks, said a spokesman at GovTech, the agency behind public sector tech transformation including the development of Singpass and CorpPass.
"The system has been fully restored at 5.15pm. We apologise for any inconvenience caused to users," said a GovTech spokesman in a statement.
Users started experiencing intermittent problems and slowness in logging into their SingPass and CorpPass accounts for accessing e-government services as early as 11am.
Technical coordinator Zhang JayKay, 29, said he was not able to access his Central Provident Fund (CPF) account. "I kept getting an error page. I thought it was my network but every other website is working properly," he told The Straits Times.
Office manager Anna Alias, 34, said CorpPass has not been working since lunch time.
"Once, I had a successful log-in but no one-time password was sent to my mobile phone," said Ms Alias, who uses CorpPass regularly to file CPF contributions for staff and apply for Productivity and Innovation Credit claims.
At around 3pm, both SingPass and CorpPass services were taken down.
On SingPass' website, users were greeted with the message: "We are currently experiencing high traffic to our site. Please try again later. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Thank you for your patience and understanding."
At about 4pm, the message became: "System maintenance in progress. SingPass is temporarily unavailable due to a technical glitch. We are working to restore the service within the next two hours. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, and thank you for your patience."
A similar message appeared on CorpPass' website: "CorpPass is temporarily unavailable due to a technical glitch. We are working to restore the service within next two hours. We apologise for any inconvenience caused, and thank you for your patience."
Set up in 2003 for Singapore residents to access e-government services, SingPass has more than 3.3 million registered users and supports 57 million e-government transactions including income tax, CPF and Housing Development Board loan records.
CorpPass, rolled out in September 2016, is meant forfor corporate transactions, including filing of corporate taxes and making work permit applications, so they need not use individuals' SingPass accounts to do so.
The disruption comes a week after a nearly two-hour-long outage last Friday (Feb 2) on the critical cashless services provided by Nets.
