Hit by unusual outage, Singtel website and mobile apps go down

Instead of deals for the latest 5G phones, broadband and TV services, Singtel’s website appeared yesterday with an “under construction” sign, along with some advertising links, as the telecom operator faced an unusual breakdown.

Singtel website was down from around 9pm last night until early morning around 1am. When users typed in the Singtel.com web address, they were directed to an unrelated website instead of the correct one. This meant that they could not log in and access certain Singtel services.

For any business to see their website go down is a disgrace. More so if it is Singapore’s largest telecom operator, which also sells cybersecurity services to businesses.

Alongside the site, Singtel said on its Facebook page last night that several of its apps were affected, including those customers use to manage their mobile services and listen to TV programs.

In later updates, the telecom operator said services and the website were fully restored around 8 a.m. He apologized to the users.

While outages are expected from time to time, and yesterday’s downtime lasted for hours, not days, it’s not common for a telco to lose control of its main website.

“We began having issues with our domain name servers around 9 p.m., which caused difficulties for customers to log into our website and apps,” a spokesperson said. Singtel in Techgoondu.

“Our engineers worked overnight to remedy this, gradually restoring the Singtel TV Go app, then our website and all other affected apps around 8am this morning,” she added. “Throughout this period, none of our core services in mobile, broadband fiber, TV and landline have been affected.”

“We apologize once again for the inconvenience caused to our customers and appreciate their patience and understanding.”

UPDATE 5/13/2022, 4:51 PM: The story has been updated with Singtel’s statement.