SINGAPORE — National health technology agency Synapxe said on Wednesday (Nov 1) that it found no evidence to indicate that data and internal networks have been compromised, after a disruption that lasted a few hours.

Users had reported errors when trying to get on the websites of some public healthcare institutions in the morning.

These include Singapore General Hospital, National University Hospital and Tan Tock Seng Hospital. 

The websites of Singapore's three public healthcare clusters — SingHealth, the National Healthcare Group (NHG) and the National University Health System (NUHS) — were also inaccessible.

Attempts to access the websites showed error messages saying that the web address could not be retrieved.

The website of Synapxe was also inaccessible.

A check by TODAY at about 5pm showed that the websites were back up after earlier tries by users to access them produced error messages saying that the web address could not be retrieved.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page on Wednesday night, Synapxe said that at about 9.20am, services requiring internet connectivity at public healthcare institutions — including websites, emails and a few internet-facing applications — became inaccessible.

Internet connectivity for the affected public healthcare institutions have been progressively restored from 4.30pm.

Most of the affected services were later restored by 5.15pm, it added.

"Clinical services and operations at the public healthcare institutions, such as access to patient records and appointment systems, remained accessible and unaffected throughout the disruption, and patient care had not been compromised."

Synapxe supports the operations of 46 public healthcare institutions, including acute hospitals and polyclinics, and around 1,400 community partners such as nursing homes and general practitioners.

In an earlier Facebook post at 12.43pm on Wednesday, Synapxe said that an “internet access disruption” is affecting all public healthcare clusters.

"Services requiring internet applications like websites, emails and the NUHS contact centre are inaccessible,” it added.

In response to TODAY's queries, SingHealth said that patients can continue to make appointments and access billing services using the SingHealth Health Buddy application.

"We are currently working with Synapxe, our healthcare IT partner, to resolve the issue. We apologise for any inconvenience caused," the public healthcare cluster added.

NHG and NUHS also asked their patients to contact healthcare institutions under their clusters via social media if necessary. 

The website of the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC), which coordinates eldercare services, was also affected.

Websites of private hospitals, such as Mount Elizabeth Novena and Raffles Medical Group, appear to be unaffected while the websites of the Ministry of Health and HealthHub websites were working.

Synapxe said that it will continue to monitor the situation closely.

"We apologise for any inconvenience caused and thank everyone for your patience."

Investigations into the outage of internet connectivity are ongoing, it added.