After M1 reported at 6am today that it had “fully restored” internet services for its fiber broadband subscribers, state regulators said they would investigate the company for potential “lapses.”
People across the country, including in the western, central, and east areas, had flooded the ISP’s Facebook page yesterday from as early as 7am to complain about the internet outage. In the telco’s seventh and final update this morning, it said that service had been restored after maintenance was conducted in the wee hours.
“We have completed our fibre system maintenance and all fibre services have been fully restored. If your fibre connection continues to be offline, do switch off and on your ONT and router to reconnect your devices. We apologise for the inconvenience, and thank our customers for their patience and kind understanding,” the 6am update read.
Later in the morning, the Infocomm Media Development Authority issued a statement saying it had launched an investigation and would “not hesitate to take strong enforcement actions should there be any lapses on M1’s part.”
Many customers continued to complain that they had no recourse after losing service they are depending on while stay-home orders are in effect. A number called on the regulator to pass any fines on to consumers.
“However if you should fine M1 and subscribers do not get any sort of compensation, it’s not going to help. Because M1 will pass the cost to subscribers in future due to higher cost (including fines, network maintenance)” Facebooker Riversound Res wrote in reply to the regulator’s announcement.
In 2017, Singtel was fined S$500,000 for a similar 24-hour outage.
It was not until 7:30pm yesterday when the cause of the disruption was “identified,” according to M1, without elaborating further on what caused it.
At 3:30am, it said maintenance to its fiber service was taking place. Around three hours later, it said service was back to normal.
The telco had also insisted that only a “specific group of customers” was affected by the disruption.
When Coconuts Singapore checked M1’s outage map around 5am today on DownDetector.com, which analyzes outages around the world, M1’s disruption appeared widespread.
M1 did not immediately respond to online inquiries.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with a statement from IMDA that it was investigating the company and consumer reactions.
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