Fire at SingTel facility causes huge disruptions across island

SINGAPORE — A fire in a cable room at a SingTel facility in Bukit Panjang — which was put out in 20 minutes — caused massive disruptions to a range of services islandwide including those offered by other telcos, banks and other companies, affecting tens of thousands of people since 2pm yesterday.

Apart from disruption to fixed line, broadband and mobile services, ATMs and other banking services provided by DBS, POSB, UOB and OCBC were also down.

Some bank branches had to extend their opening hours to cater to frustrated customers who had to wait for the services to be restored.

Singapore Pools outlets islandwide — except its main branch at Middle Road — were unable to accept bets from customers for several hours, forcing it to delay the closing time at its main outlet from 5pm to 8.30pm, in order to give punters extra time to place their bets.

It also had to conduct its 4D draw yesterday about two-and-a-half hours after its scheduled time.

Click here to view a map of locations affected by the disruption

Some workers were also told to knock off early as they could not get any work done at their workplace.

SingTel engineers worked overnight to restore the services, which were expected to resume fully by 6 this morning.

A SingTel spokesman said the fire damaged the network infrastructure — 33 fibre cables specifically — and affected 100 mobile base stations. As at about 9.15pm yesterday — about three hours after restoration work began — eight cables had been repaired.

SingTel was unable to reveal the total number of its mobile base stations as this was sensitive information. The incident affected some fixed voice lines, broadband and TV services in Woodlands, Bukit Panjang, Chua Chu Kang, Upper Bukit Timah and Mandai, as well as mobile services in parts of Woodlands, Marsiling and Kranji, the spokesman said.

Data lines for some corporate customers were also affected.

Services for about 60,000 out of some 561,000 fixed broadband lines operated by SingTel were disrupted, along with 30,000 fixed voice lines, which account for less than 2 per cent of the telco’s total.

Some 30,000 mio TV customers — about 7 per cent of total number of customers — were also affected.

“We apologise to affected customers for the inconvenience they have experienced and thank them for their patience,” the SingTel spokesman said.

Disgruntled customers flocked to SingTel’s Facebook page, posting hundreds of messages on the disruption.

Woodlands resident Fidya Nurane, 19, said that her mio TV service went blank at around 3pm. She added that she was unable to send out text messages to other SingTel users. Her Wi-Fi connection was also down.

Ms Jennifer Lee, 43, a company director, called the MediaCorp News Hotline after observing unusually long queues at two Singapore Pools outlets. Punters lingered about waiting for the payment and sales operations to be restored, she added.

An employee of a company in Boon Keng said the Internet in her office was down from around 2pm. She added that some of her colleagues were given permission by their supervisors to leave work early.

FACILITY HOSTS SERVICES ISLANDWIDE

Yesterday’s disruption came less than a week after the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) handed M1 a record S$1.5 million fine for a service disruption to 2G and 3G mobile telephone services in January that lasted more than 60 hours, affecting some 250,000 M1 users.

Both SingTel and IDA said they were investigating yesterday’s incident.

The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) said that it received a call at 2.16pm to attend to the fire, which broke out at a cable room in level one of the facility at 40, Woodlands Road. The SCDF said the fire was extinguished in 20 minutes by two water jets. No injuries were reported.

SingTel engineers were only allowed to enter the building after 6pm, when it was declared safe by the SCDF.

An IDA spokesman said that the Bukit Panjang facility is used to host systems and equipment such as telephone switches and cables for telecommunication services. He added that the services hosted by the facility may serve different parts of the island.

StarHub said it leases some of SingTel’s optical fibre capacity, which is hosted at the affected facility.

Its Chief Technology Officer Mock Pak Lum said that cable TV, cable and fibre broadband and digital voice services for some customers — mostly in the north-west part of the island — were affected.

Some of M1’s broadband service customers were also affected, the telco said on its Facebook page. The disruption also caused longer waiting times at its Causeway Point outlet where the network system was hit.

A DBS spokesperson said that “a small proportion” of DBS/POSB branches, ATMs and AXS services were affected. DBS “acted promptly” to extend operating hours at all its branches by an hour, as well as provide emergency cash to customers, the spokesperson said. As at 7.50pm, two of its branches remained affected.

UOB said that services were disrupted at about 4pm at two of its branches in Woodlands and Bukit Panjang. There was “minimal customer impact” as the disruption happened towards the end of their opening hours, it noted.

OCBC said 11 of its ATMs were down during the disruption, including those at Ghim Moh, Woodlands, Bukit Panjang, Geylang, Upper Boon Keng and Changi Airport Terminal 2.