PREPARING FOR FUTURE OUTAGES
When outages occur, service providers should go beyond investigating the root cause and review their recovery processes, failover mechanisms and system dependencies. The three consecutive days of Singtel mobile service disruptions, followed by broadband internet issues a week later, could indicate hidden dependencies between seemingly independent components.
Resilience strategies need to be revisited. Telco providers need to practise for failures through drills and simulations, and test how quickly they can recover.
Because fixing the backbone of the telecommunications network remains the responsibility of service providers, there is little Singaporeans can do. But there are small ways to be prepared, such as keeping some cash on hand so that you are not totally dependent on mobile payment.
