StarHub's fibre broadband falters as Singaporeans telecommute during 'circuit breaker' period

STARHUB'S fibre broadband services were hit by intermittent outages on Wednesday, causing disruption to some of its over 500,000 residential customers at a time when an unprecedented number of Singaporeans are telecommuting amid the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In its latest update on Facebook at 8.45pm, the telco said that the affected fibre broadband services have been "fully restored", adding that it will continue to monitor the situation to ensure service stability for customers. It confirmed that broadband services to enterprise customers were unaffected.

StarHub's chief technology officer Chong Siew Loong apologised to customers in a statement and gave the assurance that traffic on the telco's network is "well below" its available capacity.

He added that "ample redundancy" has been built into StarHub's network to cater for "high service levels to be delivered consistently".

StarHub said there is no evidence to indicate a cyber attack. 

The Down Detector website which logs Internet outages, said that, from as early as around 11am on Wednesday, there was a network issue with one of StarHub's Domain Name Servers that handles Internet traffic routing. 

StarHub said that fibre services to some customers in the north and north-eastern parts of the island were temporarily affected for about 20 minutes in the morning due to a network equipment fault. "Backup equipment took over immediately and affected services started to resume progressively," the telco added. 

But some users were still reporting outages in the afternoon. It was only a few hours later, at 5.30pm, that StarHub said it had rectified the issue. The affected fibre broadband services were then "progressively restored". 

StarHub's issues come as more Singaporeans have been pushed to work from home as part of elevated safe-distancing measures to curb community spread of Covid-19. 

In response to The Business Times, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said on Wednesday that it "takes a serious view of any service disruption to public telecommunications services, especially during the circuit-breaker period, when many of us are working or studying from home".

The regulator has asked StarHub to restore the affected services "expeditiously", and to keep its subscribers updated on the progress.

IMDA added that it has commenced investigations into the two service disruptions to StarHub's Internet services on Wednesday, and will not hesitate to take "strong enforcement action" if lapses are found.  

"Singapore's telecom infrastructure is robust and we have sufficient buffer capacity in our networks today," the authority said.

IMDA reiterated that it is taking steps with the telcos to make additional investments to increase the buffer, based on industry best practices, to cater for unexpected increases in capacity demand. 

"Today's service disruptions are unlikely to be related to network capacity constraints," IMDA said. 

IMDA had said last week, and on April 3, that Singapore's fixed and mobile networks have the capacity to cope with higher levels of Internet use.