M1 fibre broadband outage hits thousands of users

Thousands of M1 fibre broadband users around Singapore were left without Internet access for more than 17 hours yesterday during a time when subscribers need to work and study from home amid the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

M1's disruption, which comes one month after StarHub's intermittent outage, was still not resolved as of 10pm yesterday.

According to the Downdetector website, which logs Internet outages, M1 started having problems around 4.30am, before complaints spiked at 9am with around 1,500 reports.

On its Facebook page, M1 first reported the problem at 8am, noting that customers in some areas in the western, central and eastern parts of Singapore were affected, and that its engineers were working hard to resolve the issue.

Many netizens said that northern Singapore was affected as well.

In an update at 7.30pm, M1 said its engineers had identified and isolated the issue causing disruptions to the affected group of customers.

It did not say what the issue was.

Accounts officer Carol Tan, who lives in Jurong West Street 61, was still waiting for her fibre broadband connection to resume more than four hours after it first stopped working at about 7.45am.

"It's quite hard for us without broadband as we are all heavy (Internet) users. My husband and I are deaf, and we rely on the Internet a lot to update ourselves on what's happening outside," said the 45-year-old, who has two teenage children.

"My son also has an online class soon and we will have to see what happens."

Life coach Joseph Kalai, 45, noticed his broadband connection speed slowing to less than 100Mbps - a tenth of the 1Gbps he pays for - on Monday.

"I still had a connection but I read about the situation (yesterday) and for some reason decided to restart my router around 11am. Since then, no Internet," said Mr Kalai, who lives in the east.

"I think there was already some issue since Monday but no one picked up on it."

Mr Lim Jing Hong, who works in financial services, told The Straits Times that he normally starts work around 7am and could not get his connection to work at 6.55am.

The 32-year-old, who lives in Marsiling, said: "I could not verify if it was my router, personal connection, or M1's connection that was having problems...

"I only verified after getting through the hotline more than 30 minutes later.

"I thought communication (from the telco) was severely lacking. I missed morning meetings today, (and) had to arrange for other colleagues to cover my duties."

Last month, two network service disruptions on the same day affected thousands of StarHub subscribers, and were attributed to network equipment failure and a domain name server issue.

Addressing the issue of network capacity in Parliament last week, Communications and Information Minister S. Iswaran said Internet usage in Singapore remains well within network operators' capacity despite a spike in traffic during the circuit breaker period.