StarHub's chief executive apologises for outage, customers to receive one-time 20% rebate

SINGAPORE — StarHub’s chief executive Peter Kaliaropoulos apologises for the home broadband service disruption on 15 April, in a press release shared today (16 April).

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption of service and frustration experienced by some of our customers on Wednesday. Our customers place great trust and importance on our network quality and resiliency, and we regrettably fell short of giving them the service experience they deserve,” said Kaliaropoulos.

“The root cause has been identified as an internal network change management process, and our key priority now is to ensure service stability and quality. We have taken immediate steps to implement measures to prevent a recurrence, and we are reviewing relevant processes. We are also cooperating fully with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) in investigations, and we welcome any infrastructure audit by IMDA as needed. This incident was not caused by any out-of-date equipment, capacity shortage or a cyber attack. Our network infrastructure is robust; we utilise hardware and software from global technology leaders, and redundancies are built-in as part of our extensive business continuity planning.”

In addition to the apology, StarHub will offer affected customers a one-time 20% rebate on their Home Broadband monthly fee, which is equivalent to six days of free home WiFi service. A dedicated website will be made available for affected customers to register for the rebate.

StarHub said it had fully restored its internet service on Wednesday night (15 April), after many of its broadband subscribers experienced disruptions to their connection for a large part of the day.

“We would like to confirm that all affected services have been fully restored as of 8.20pm,” the telco told Yahoo Lifestyle SEA. “We will continue to monitor the situation closely to ensure service stability for customers.”

StarHub’s Chief Technology Officer, Chong Siew Loong, said, “We apologise deeply for the inconvenience caused by the intermittent disruption of home broadband services to some of our customers today.”

Chong added, “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.

“We take this incident seriously and will conduct a detailed root cause analysis so that we can prevent future recurrence. We would like to thank you for your patience and understanding.”

Broadband services to enterprise customers were unaffected during the outage, said Chong.

Disruption for home-based workers and students

StarHub customers began reporting disruptions to their internet connection in the morning. Many users were frustrated as people in Singapore were going online from home to work or study remotely. The government had ordered the closure of workplaces and schools last week to curb the spread of coronavirus infections. As of Wednesday, more than 3,200 people in Singapore had been infected with the virus responsible for a worldwide pandemic, and 10 people in the country had died from the COVID-19 disease.

StarHub had said earlier at 5.30pm that it was progressively restoring affected fibre broadband services after rectifying a network issue with one of its Domain Name Servers. There was no evidence to indicate a cyber attack.

Earlier in the morning, StarHub said fibre services to some customers in the North and North-East regions of Singapore were temporarily affected for about 20 minutes due to a fault in a network equipment. The company said backup equipment took over immediately and affected services started to resume progressively. Customers were advised to reboot their modems and routers to refresh their data connection, although many continued to report service outages despite doing so. StarHub could not confirm whether the morning and afternoon outages were linked.

The Infocomm and Media Development Authority (IMDA) said in a statement after StarHub restored its services, “IMDA takes a serious view of any service disruption to public telecommunications services, especially during the circuit-breaker period, where many of us are working and studying from home. IMDA has required StarHub to restore the affected services expeditiously, and to keep its subscribers updated on the progress.”

The government agency added, “IMDA has commenced investigations into the two service disruptions to StarHub’s Internet services today, and will not hesitate to take strong enforcement action should there be any lapses on StarHub’s part.”

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