Southeast Asia's largest telecom firm Singtel fined $774K for service disruption affecting 500,000 customers

"The public’s access to customer service lines for some government agencies, healthcare organizations, banks and companies, and emergency call services was also affected," the Infocomm and Media Development Authority (IMDA) said in a statement Thursday.

People walk past Singtel logo outside its headquarter building in Singapore on May 12, 2016. Photo by AFP

Singtel Singapore chief executive Ng Tian Chong accepted IMDA’s ruling and the financial penalty, The Business Times reported.

"We recognize the seriousness of the disruption to our fixed voice service last October," he said. "I would like to express my sincere apologies once again for the disruption and inconvenience experienced."

IMDA said it factored in the scale and impact of the outage, along with the time needed to restore services, when determining the penalty.

The regulator classified the incident’s impact as "significant" and noted that the potential implications for public safety and security "could have been very serious."

IMDA’s probe revealed that Singtel’s monitoring system’s lacked "adequate filters" to shield the hardware from high-intensity traffic on Oct 8, 2024. This led the voice system’s firewall to malfunction and operate intermittently.

As a result, calls were dropped intermittently as traffic switched between the affected and unaffected voice systems.

In September, an emergency service outage involving Singtel subsidiary Optus resulted in three deaths in Australia.

That was followed by a smaller Singtel mobile outage on Nov. 18, with more than 1,600 reports logged on Downdetector that afternoon.

Singtel is the largest mobile network operator in Southeast Asia. It has 800 million mobile customers globally.