Singtel Singapore CEO Ng Tian Chong on Mar 19 apologised for the outages, and said that the disruption that occurred on the first day was due to a “mechanical fault” at one of the company’s network facilities.

Separately, on Mar 17, around 2,000 customers faced mobile connectivity issues due to “a software bug from an earlier pre-planned IT system upgrade”.

“This issue was not immediately apparent as it coincided with the earlier incident. Once identified, our teams took immediate action and connectivity was progressively restored, with full restoration completed by around 4pm on the same day,” said Mr Ng.

Following those disruptions, the company carried out some network reconfigurations to “further stabilise and optimise performance”, he said.

During this process, there was a brief spike in network traffic at around 5.30pm on Mar 18. 

These events were unrelated to one another, Mr Ng said.

“We are committed to learning from these events and working with our vendors to further enhance our network resilience and improve recovery times,” he added.