SINGAPORE: A Singtel mobile outage that lasted over eight hours on Monday (March 16) disrupted essential services in Singapore, including payments, ride hailing and food delivery.
The cause of the disruption, which started at around 10.30am, is still unknown. But the telco said it is not due to a cyberattack.
After more than eight hours, Singtel said in a Facebook post at around 7pm that its services had been restored. “We’d like to update that 4G and 5G mobile services have been restored. We apologise for the inconvenience caused,” the post said.
Singtel posted another notice at nearly 9pm, noting that some customers could still be experiencing problems connecting to the network. It advised them to switch their devices to airplane mode and back, or restart their phones. It said customers could also call Singtel on 1688 for assistance.
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.
In a statement, payment services group NETS said that only merchants using Singtel cards in their NETS terminals, and consumers using Singtel’s mobile connection to make payments, were affected on March 16.
“Users and terminals using Wi-Fi connectivity should not be affected, and merchants who continue to face issues may contact NETS Customer Service for assistance,” said NETS.
Gig workers’ ability to take on jobs was hit hard 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 had 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 a 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.
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,” he said.
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.
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 had brought along another phone that was on the StarHub network.
“It is frustrating because Singtel prides itself and markets itself explicitly on being the widest and most reliable network,” said Tan.
Sector regulator Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) 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 made the hotlines of the Singapore Civil Defence Force and police, as well as those of hospitals and banks, 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, a senior research fellow at think-tank Centre for Strategic Cyberspace and International Studies, said the outage could be due to many factors, including hardware, software, power supply or human error.
Recalling Singtel’s 2024 incident that disrupted emergency call services, he said the latest incident raised questions about Singtel’s reliability. “The big question is: What happened to backup and resilience?” - The Straits Times/ANN
