Singtel mobile services restored after eight-hour disruption; payment, ride hailing services affected

Singtel's mobile outage lasted more than eight hours on March 16, and disrupted essential services in Singapore.SINGAPORE - A Singtel mobile outage that lasted more than eight hours on March 16 has disrupted essential services in Singapore including payments, ride hailing and food delivery services.The cause of the disruption, which started at around 10.30am, is still unknown. But the telco said it is not due to a cyber attack.After more than eight hours, Singtel said in a Facebook post at around 7pm that its services were restored.“We’d like to update that 4G and 5G mobile services have been restored. We apologise for the inconvenience caused,” said the telco.It is not known how many Singtel users were affected, but service outage website Downdetector received thousands of reports from affected users including those using its no-frills GOMO plans.Payment services group NETS in a Facebook post at 12.35pm said: “NETS has been notified by Singtel that they are currently experiencing a mobile connectivity issue. This may impact some transactions on NETS terminals and QR payments. We are working closely with Singtel to resolve the issue.”Gig workers’ ability to take on jobs were hard hit by the outage.When Grab delivery driver Suhada Abdullah, 51, started her shift at 11am, she could not connect to the Grab app. When her connection was restored at around 3pm, she already lost four hours of potential wages.“There could be a 40 per cent drop in my earnings today,” she said, adding that she usually earns about $100 during a 10-hour shift.Gojek driver Lui Teow Eng, 56, was forced to take about a two hour break from around 10.30am to noon when he realised that he could not connect to the app after dropping off a passenger at Changi Airport.Mr Lui, who earns up to $400 a day before deducting rental and petrol costs, said the disruption came at an unfortunate time when drivers were facing higher costs.“I might lose up to $100 in earnings, and may drive an additional few hours later today to make up for it,” said Mr Lui.Overseas Singaporeans were also affected.Private banker Kelvin Tan, 46, was on a ski holiday with his family in Hokkaido, Japan, when his Singtel connection was cut off at around 11am.Mr Tan, who works in a Swiss bank, was using Singtel’s $35 14-day data roaming plan to answer urgent WhatsApp calls from clients. He was thankful he brought along another phone on the StarHub network.“It is frustrating because Singtel prides itself and markets itself explicitly on being the widest and most reliable network,” said Mr Tan.Sector regulator Infocomm Media Development Authority said in a media response that it is aware of the disruption to Singtel’s mobile network services.“IMDA takes a serious view of any service disruptions and will investigate this incident,” it said.Singtel commands half of the local telco market, with its 4.5 million subscribers.IMDA requires telcos to plan, design and operate resilient networks, and put in place measures to ensure speedy recovery and minimal inconvenience to end users in the event of a disruption.Under the Telecommunications Act, the authority may impose a penalty of up to $1 million, or up to 10 per cent of the annual turnover of errant service providers.In October 2024, an unprecedented islandwide disruption involving Singtel’s telecommunications network saw hotlines of the Singapore Civil Defence Force and police, as well as those of hospitals and banks, made unreachable.The telco operator was fined $1 million over the fixed-line outage incident, which affected 500,000 users for more than four hours.In November 2025, a mobile service outage affected Singtel customers for six hours.Cybersecurity expert Anthony Lim, who is a senior research fellow at think tank Center for Strategic Cyber and International Studies said it is hard to pinpoint what could be the cause of the outage.“It could be hardware, software, power supply, human error and also one system’s outage which might pull another part of the network or service down and compound the issue,” said Mr Lim.Recalling Singtel’s series of outage, especially the 2024 incident which disrupted emergency call services, Mr Lim said the latest incident raised questions about Singtel’s reliability.“For such a big, important and national communications service, and one considered by the government as a critical infrastructure, the big question is – don’t they have a backup for power supply, network core switches and routers, data storage, application servers or data centers?”“What happened to resilience?”Source: The Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproductionDiscover how to enjoy other premium articles here