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SINGAPORE: The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has imposed a financial penalty of S$1 million (US$770,000) on Singtel for a landline disruption last year that affected half a million users.<\/p>\n
The fixed voice disruption on Oct 8, 2024, affected about 500,000 of Singtel\u2019s residential and corporate users for more than four hours, during which the public\u2019s access to customer service lines for some government agencies, healthcare organisations, banks and companies, and emergency call services were affected, said IMDA on Thursday (Dec 11).<\/p>\n
Singtel said in response to CNA’s query that it accepts IMDA\u2019s ruling and the financial penalty. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “We recognise the seriousness of the disruption to our fixed voice service last October and the concern and distress it caused our customers and members of the public,” said Singtel Singapore CEO Ng Tian Chong.<\/span><\/p>\n Mr Ng added that the telco took “immediate remediation action” after the incident by improving its network design and hardware configuration, as well as enhancing monitoring processes.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “We also worked with our clients to strengthen their customer service hotline resiliency,” he said.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n “Network reliability and resiliency (are) top priorities for us and we are committed to strengthening our systems, so that we can continue to provide reliable essential connectivity services to our customers.”<\/span><\/p>\n IMDA’s investigation found that Singtel hosted two separate virtualised firewalls on the same hardware – one for its fixed-line voice system and another for the monitoring system for home broadband routers and Pay TV set-top boxes, read the media release.<\/p>\n \u201cThis meant that both virtualised firewalls shared the same hardware memory resources,\u201d said IMDA.<\/p>\n \u201cAs the monitoring system\u2019s virtualised firewall did not have adequate filters installed to protect the hardware against high-intensity traffic, the shared memory resources of the hardware were overwhelmed when the monitoring system faced increased traffic intensity on Oct 8, 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThis caused the virtualised firewall of the voice system to also malfunction and operate intermittently,\u201d said the authority.<\/p>\n IMDA said that voice traffic from the affected voice system should have been fully and seamlessly redirected to a separate voice system at an unaffected site through an automatic failover mechanism.<\/p>\n However, the failover did not happen seamlessly due to the intermittency of the affected voice system\u2019s virtualised firewall, leading to calls being dropped intermittently as voice traffic alternated between the affected and unaffected voice systems.<\/p>\n \u201cThe incident was resolved only after Singtel fully swung all voice traffic to the unaffected voice system,\u201d said IMDA.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nINVESTIGATION FINDINGS<\/h2>\n