Instead of offers for the latest 5G phones, broadband and TV services, the Singtel website yesterday appeared with an “under construction” sign, along with a few advertisement links, as the telecom operator faced an unusual outage.
The Singtel website was down from roughly 9pm last night to early morning around 1am. When users typed Singtel.com Web address, they would be pointed to an unrelated website instead of the correct one. This meant they couldn’t log in and access some Singtel services.
For any company to have its website go down is an embarrassment. More so, if it’s Singapore’s largest telco, which also sells cybersecurity services to corporate customers.
Along with the site, Singtel said on its Facebook page last night that several of its apps were affected, including ones that customers used to manage their mobile services and to tune in to TV programmes.
In updates later, the telco said the services and the website were fully restored around 8am in the morning. It apologised to users.
While outages are expected from time to time, and the downtime yesterday lasted hours, not days, it is not common for a telco to lose control of its main website.
“We started having issues with our domain name servers around 9pm in the evening which resulted in customers experiencing difficulties logging onto our website and apps,” a Singtel spokesperson told Techgoondu.
“Our engineers worked overnight to rectify this, progressively restoring the Singtel TV Go app, then our website and all other affected apps by around 8am this morning,” she added. “During this entire period, none of our core services in mobile, fibre broadband, TV and fixed line were affected.”
“We apologise once again for the inconvenience caused to our customers and are grateful for their patience and understanding.”
UPDATE at 13/05/2022, 4:51pm: The story has been updated with Singtel’s statement.
