SINGAPORE - M1 has apologised to its customers for a fibre broadband outage on Monday (Dec 21) morning.

The outage - the second in a month - was experienced just after 10am by users islandwide, including those in Woodlands, Yishun, Pasir Ris, Tiong Bahru and Hougang.

In its statement on Monday, M1 said that the disruption was due to a faulty equipment card supporting its fibre broadband service which the telco has replaced.

"Given the recurrence we will be reviewing our complete broadband technical architecture to prevent the occurrence of such incidents," M1 added.

On Dec 4, M1 users were also hit by a fibre broadband outage that lasted for more than four hours.

The telco added in its Monday statement that its engineers and recovery team were immediately activated to resolve the issue after M1 received reports of the disruption at 11am. Service was progressively restored.

Earlier in the day, M1 had said on Facebook that those users who were still experiencing difficulty connecting to their network should turn their devices off before turning them on again. They should refrain from removing cables on their optical network terminal and router devices.

Following the outage on Monday morning, M1 users took to social media, including the telco's Facebook page, to express their concerns.

Its latest post has received more than 2,100 comments as of Monday afternoon.

According to the Downdetector website which logs Internet outages, M1 started having problems at 10.08am, with the number of reports peaking at more than 12,000 at about 11.30am.

During the circuit breaker, M1 had two other disruptions which lasted for almost 30 hours collectively from May 12 to 13.

The first was due to a corrupted profile database in the telco's broadband network gateway, while the second was caused by a software fault that occurred in its network equipment.

M1 was fined $400,000 by the Infocomm Media Development Authority in September for those service disruptions.

Toa Payoh resident Ken Kwee, 47, said that his broadband connection was down since 10am. Mr Kwee, who works in sales, added that despite restarting his router five times, his connection was still cut off as at 1pm.

"I was in a Zoom meeting with my clients and due to this technical glitch, I had to waste 15 minutes of their time," he added.

Punggol resident Ngee Key Chan, 48, also experienced connection difficulties.

The career transitions coach had to re-start his Microsoft Teams meeting as a result of the fibre broadband outage but has no plans to switch his telco.

"I have been with M1 for eight years and this is the first year when there have been severe shortages. Previously there were some disruptions, but only intermittent ones," he added.