StarHub customers hit by major internet outage; working and studying from home affected

SINGAPORE — StarHub customers were affected by a major internet outage on Wednesday (April 15), with users in multiple locations across the island complaining of disruptions since the morning. 

The disruption lasted for at least nine hours, with StarHub announcing that services have been fully restored as of 8.20pm. 

“We will continue to monitor the situation closely to ensure service stability for customers. Thank you for your patience and understanding,” StarHub’s chief technology officer Chong Siew Loong said in a statement.

Mr Chong had earlier apologised to StarHub's customers for the inconvenience caused by the disruption.

"The disruption arose due to a network issue with one of our Domain Name Servers that handles internet traffic routing, which has since been rectified," he said.

"We take this incident seriously and will conduct a detailed root cause analysis so that we can prevent future recurrence."

Many frustrated customers posted comments on StarHub's Facebook page, saying that they were unable to work or complete school assignments from home, while others added that their children could not carry out home-based learning as a result of the outage. 

Facebook user James Tan wrote: “Hey StarHub, what’s happening with your internet?? Am at central region of Singapore and totally can’t connect to your fibre broadband and 4G connection is extremely intermittent (can’t surf the Internet) I have lots of work to get done!!” 

Another user, Lala Rose, said: “StarHub i have been switching on and off the wifi soo many times and still down. How i got more problem due to the wifi is down. Firstly i cannot do my school things for example i cant connect to my mircosoft teams where everyday my whole class is using it.”

In a statement put up on its Facebook page at about 12.50pm, StarHub said that fibre services to some customers in the North and North-East regions were temporarily affected on Wednesday morning for about 20 minutes due to a "fault in a network equipment".

But at around 6pm, irate users were still complaining on the telco's Facebook page that their internet services have not been restored.

At about 6.20pm, StarHub told TODAY that affected fibre broadband services were being “progressively restored” for customers. “We have rectified a network issue with one of our Domain Name Servers that handles internet traffic routing. Restoration of services is being closely monitored,” it added. “There is no evidence to indicate a cyber attack. We will bring our customers further updates upon full service restoration.”

Earlier, it said that affected services started to resume progressively after backup equipment immediately took over.

Apologising to its customers for the inconvenience caused, StarHub advised customers to reboot their modems and routers to refresh their data connection.

The disruption began at about 11am, according to social media posts on Twitter and StarHub's Facebook page.

An outage map on the Down Detector website shows problems with the StarHub network at about 5.50pm on April 15, 2020. Source: Downdetector