Faulty server behind 2 days of intermittent SingPass, CorpPass outage

SINGAPORE — Users of the Government’s identity authentication systems SingPass and CorpPass experienced a second day of intermittent service outages on Friday (Feb 9), which the authorities have traced to faulty hardware in a server.

The latest service outage lasted some three hours, following Thursday’s disruption of about six hours. Both services were fully restored at 3.15pm on Friday.

"Both incidents are not cybersecurity-related," the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) said on Friday in response to queries from TODAY. 

The agency added: "The slowness in the system (on Friday) is related to the incident caused by a server fault (on Thursday). We have identified and removed the faulty hardware in the server.

"We will comprehensively review the incident and implement the necessary measures to minimise such service disruptions."

SingPass and CorpPass users first reported problems accessing the services on Thursday morning. The Straits Times reported that both services had to be taken down for urgent maintenance before being fully restored at 5.15pm on Thursday.

But users reported intermittent outages again on Friday morning. GovTech said services were fully restored at 3.15pm, and told users who were unable to log on to its services to clear the cache on their Internet browsers.

"We apologise for any inconvenience caused to users,” said GovTech, the agency behind the public sector technology transformation.