SingPass, CorpPass services restored after 4-hour disruption, second outage in 2 days

[SINGAPORE] After a six-hour outage on Thursday, access to national authentication systems SingPass and CorpPass slowed to a crawl again for about four hours on Friday, disrupting hundreds of essential e-government services.

In a Facebook post at about 3.30pm, the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) said services were restored at 3.15pm, but some users said they still could not access their accounts.

GovTech's post read: "We are conducting a thorough review and implementing further measures to minimise any service disruption."

Facebook users started reporting problems accessing their income tax accounts as early as 11am. Some were greeted with error messages while others faced delays loading their SingPass and CorpPass accounts.

Businessman Lim Kuan Sai, 52, told The Straits Times that he was trying to file his income tax on Friday morning but could not get through. "Time for me to go for lunch now," he said.

The problem appeared to have been unresolved as of noon on Friday.

In a tweet at 12.31pm, the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) said it was aware of the problem.

"We understand SingPass and CorpPass users may be unable to access the systems. Our team is looking into the matter now. We appreciate everyone's patience and will keep you updated," it added.

On Thursday, users also started experiencing intermittent problems and slowness in accessing SingPass and CorpPass as early as 11am.

The authentication services were then taken down in the afternoon for urgent maintenance due to a "server fault", said GovTech, the agency behind public-sector technology transformation, including the development of SingPass and CorpPass.

Thursday's outage was not a result of any cyber attack and services were fully restored at about 5.15pm, GovTech said.

Set up in 2003 for Singapore residents to access e-government services, SingPass has more than 3.3 million registered users and supports 57 million e-government transactions, including the filing of income taxes, parking fine payments and foreign domestic worker applications.

CorpPass, rolled out in September 2016, is meant for corporate transactions, including the filing of corporate taxes and work permit applications.

THE STRAITS TIMES