Singapore telco service disruption affected emergency calls
By Janine Phakdeetham, Natalie Choy and Hallie Gu
(Bloomberg) – Singapore’s largest telecoms operator Singapore Telecommunications said its landline services were fully restored on Tuesday evening following a service disruption earlier in the day, according to a Facebook post.
The disruptions had affected Singapore’s emergency hotlines and local banks’ customer service hotlines in the late afternoon, and prevented some customers from making phone calls.
Singtel said its engineers isolated the problem with its fixed-voice services, and that it had deployed recovery measures. It added that its mobile and broadband services were unaffected. The company resolved the issues within a few hours.
DBS Group, United Overseas Bank and Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp separately reported technical issues with their customer service hotlines on Tuesday afternoon, and said the disruptions may have also affected electronic point-of-sale payment terminals that rely on landlines.
OCBC said in an update at 6 p.m. that its retail banking hotlines were back to normal. UOB said the service disruption had also been resolved. DBS said in a Facebook post that its customer-care hotline services had returned to normal, and that service at payment terminals has also been restored.
Issues affecting the 999 and 995 hotlines, used to contact emergency services including the police and medical services, were also restored, the Singapore Civil Defence Force said.
(Updates with statements from Singtel, banks and the Singapore Civil Defence Force)
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