M1 fibre broadband outage hits thousands of users
Thousands of M1 fibre broadband users were left without Internet access for more than 17 hours yesterday during a time when subscribers need to work and study from home amid the coronavirus outbreak.
M1's disruption, which comes a month after StarHub's intermittent outage, was still not resolved as of 10pm yesterday. According to the Downdetector website, which logs Internet outages, M1 started having problems around 4.30am, before complaints spiked at 9am with around 1,500 reports.
On its Facebook page, M1 first reported the problem at 8am, noting customers in some areas in the western, central and eastern parts of Singapore were affected, and its engineers were working to resolve the issue.
Many netizens said northern Singapore was affected as well.
In an update at 7.30pm, M1 said its engineers had identified and isolated the issue. It did not say what the issue was.
Accounts officer Carol Tan, who lives at Jurong West Street 61, was still waiting for her fibre broadband connection to resume more than four hours after it stopped working at 7.45am.
"My husband and I are deaf, and we rely on the Internet a lot to update ourselves on what's happening outside," said the 45-year-old, who has two teenage children.
Life coach Joseph Kalai, 45, noticed his broadband connection speed slowing to less than 100Mbps - a tenth of the 1Gbps he pays for - on Monday.
"I still had a connection, but I read about the situation (yesterday) and for some reason decided to restart my router around 11am. Since then, no Internet," said Mr Kalai, who lives in the east.
Mr Lim Jing Hong, who works in financial services and lives in Marsiling, told The Straits Times he starts work around 7am and could not get his connection to work at 6.55am.
LACKING
The 32-year-old said: "I thought communication (from the telco) was severely lacking. I missed morning meetings (and) had to arrange for other colleagues to cover my duties."
Last month, two network service disruptions on the same day affected thousands of StarHub subscribers and were attributed to network equipment failure and a domain name server issue.
Addressing network capacity in Parliament last week, Communications and Information Minister S. Iswaran said Internet usage remains well within network operators' capacity despite a spike in traffic during the circuit breaker period.
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