As Singapore spent another day on Wednesday (April 15) in the month-long circuit breaker measure to prevent the spread of Covid-19, StarHub customers began to have network problems from late morning at a time when they were supposed to work from home or do home-based learning.
The topic even became a thread on Reddit, where other users in the same predicament rallied under the heading “Anybody else’s internet/data not working?”
StarHub kept its customers updated via its Facebook page. At 3.45 pm, it announced that it was aware that users were experiencing intermittent Internet connection and that it was investigating the matter.
At 5.30 pm, it announced that it was addressing a network issue and assured the public that there was no evidence of a cyber attack.
However, its subscribers were not at all happy because they were supposed to work from home or do home-based learning.
At 8:15pm, the company issued an apology to customers who were inconvenienced and further explained the cause for the interruption. “We apologise deeply for the inconvenience caused by the intermittent disruption of home broadband services to some of our customers today,” the statement said. “We are monitoring the progressive restoration of services closely, and will provide an update once all affected services have been fully resumed. We confirm that broadband services to enterprise customers are unaffected.”
With regard to the reason for the incident, StarHub said: “Traffic on our network is well below our available capacity and ample redundancy has been built into our network to cater for high service levels to be delivered consistently. The disruption arose due to a network issue with one of our Domain Name Servers that handles Internet traffic routing, which has since been rectified.”
The company also assured its customers that it would investigate further in order to prevent the same problem from happening again.
At 8.45 pm, it confirmed that all affected services had been fully restored as of 8.20 pm. It added that it would continue to monitor the situation closely to ensure service stability for its customers. It also thanked customers for their patience and understanding. /TISG