M1 users hit by Internet, fixed voice service outage

M1 users around Singapore were hit by a fibre broadband outage yesterday that lasted more than four hours for some, the third such disruption to the telco's services this year. Fixed voice services were also affected.

The outage was first reported by M1 on its Facebook page at 6.40pm, although comments from affected users in areas such as Woodlands, Punggol and Jurong West began to surface about an hour earlier. The telco said in an update at 10pm that all affected services had been fully restored.

Its post had drawn more than 6,400 comments by then.

"M1 users affected by this disruption will be offered a one-time waiver on their excess mobile data usage in their next M1 bill," said the telco, which apologised for the inconvenience caused.

According to the Downdetector website, which logs Internet outages, M1 started having problems at around 5.50pm, before complaints spiked at 6.45pm, with around 9,800 reports.

M1 said its fibre and fixed voice services were disrupted at 6.30pm, affecting users in some parts of Singapore.

Sembawang resident Khairul Anwar Sayali, 34, said his broadband connection went down at 6.15pm when he was watching Netflix. It was restored about two hours later.

"I wasn't badly affected, but some of my friends were in Zoom meetings for work or doing assignments, and it might not have looked good for them to (lose their) connections," said Mr Khairul, who works in estate management.

"But nobody wants this to happen, and I'm sure the engineers and everyone involved were trying their best to resolve the issue."

Taman Jurong resident Petrus Tan, 59, was in the middle of an online meeting at 6.15pm when his connection was cut off.

His smart home appliances, such as an air purifier and robot vacuum cleaner which are controlled by apps that require a network connection, also could not be operated.

Despite the hiccup, Mr Tan, who works in manufacturing, said he has no plans to switch telcos. "I have been using M1 since 1997, and I will still stay with them as the price is cheaper. Singtel and StarHub have also had such incidents before."

On social platforms like Reddit, some M1 users reported that their connections were restored between 7.15pm and 8pm.

The latest incident follows two disruptions during Singapore's circuit breaker period that 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.