Root Causes for Singtel's Recent Outage, Impact of Disruption to Essential Services and Measures to Ensure Telecom Operational Continuity and Resilience

Sir, on 8 October 2024, Singtel's fixed line voice service faced intermittent service disruption. This affected some residential and corporate users, including Government emergency phone lines such as the Singapore Civil Defence Force's (SCDF's) 995 and the Singapore Police Force's (SPF's) 999 lines, and customer service lines for some Government agencies, healthcare organisations and companies. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and Ministry of Health (MOH) will be responding to queries on the service impact on their respective sectors arising from the incident.

During the disruption, it is estimated that half of the calls could still be connected. All services were progressively restored over a four-hour time period from the start of the incident.

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) takes a serious view of this incident and is investigating the cause of this disruption and whether Singtel's incident response was adequate. Preliminary findings suggest that there was a technical issue which affected the proper functioning of a network component in one of the two systems supporting Singtel's fixed line voice service. The two systems, located in separate telephone exchanges, are designed to immediately take over the full load of the other system when one system malfunctions. However, in this instance, the failover did not happen seamlessly, which caused the intermittent service disruption. There is no evidence to suggest that the incident was related to a sabotage or cyber-attack. IMDA is continuing its investigations.

The telecommunication network in Singapore is a key infrastructure that supports our nation's connectivity needs and requirements. IMDA holds key service providers, like Singtel, to high service standards and requires them to conduct regular audits on their network and infrastructure. This includes ensuring the security of network design, redundancy measures and business continuity plans. Service providers must also ensure that their networks are resilient against disruptions.

IMDA will not hesitate to take strong action under the Telecommunication Act, including imposing financial penalties, should any lapses be identified. IMDA is working with MHA, SCDF and SPF to conduct a comprehensive review on the availability of our emergency hotlines when disruptions occurred.

Mr Speaker, I thank Senior Minister of State for his answer. Let me declare first, there was a fire at my Clementi resident's home on the morning of that day, 8 October 2024. Neighbours called 995, SCDF responded. One resident was trapped in the flat. SCDF saved his life. I visited the site later, met with residents who recognised the importance of immediate 995 availability. Had the same fire happened during the outage, if emergency services were delayed, the outcome might have been different.

Can I ask Senior Minister of State two follow-up questions?

Firstly, for landlines which supply critical essential life-and-death situation services, are the telecom companies (telcos) required by IMDA to take the very highest level of reliability, because minutes can make the difference between life and death?

Second, across the whole of Government, in our crisis and scenarios planning, is there room to be even bolder in testing our assumptions and our imagination? For example, has the scenario of a single telco failure been modelled and gamed in scenario planning and red team planning? If not, why not? And if that scenario had been considered before, why was it that a critical landline like 995 or 999 not better protected from a single telco failure becoming a broader interruption to service?

Sir, I thank Dr Tan Wu Meng for his three questions.

The landlines are regulated at the system level. So, Singtel is a key service provider, as there are the other telcos. This is a very important infrastructure. They are regulated and are required to provide a very high level of service reliability.

Dr Tan was asking from the perspective then of the 995 line or 999 line – and there, they have a sectoral requirement for communications in general which is not just only about a single telco.

I will have to leave MOH and MHA to answer the specifics for 999 and 995 lines. But the reality is that the landlines are not the only channel of communications. I think it was SCDF and SPF who put out a public notice about other alternative means for the public to contact them. And I will leave MHA and SCDF to answer that question.

So, from IMDA's perspective, we look at the system as a whole and, indeed, Singtel is held to a very high level of reliability through our regulatory framework.

Dr Tan also asked about whole-of-Government crisis planning and we, indeed, do model, red team and think through a number of scenarios, including what happens if our telecommunications infrastructure is affected. There is a certain level of redundancy required within a given network at the level of various points that they have and the infrastructure they have. There is internal redundancy that is required and internal resilience that is required. But, then again, across our nation we have resilience by having more than one network. So, indeed, we do model and red team a number of different scenarios.

Sir, as I said, I will leave the MHA to answer about the specifics of the 995 and 999 lines.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, Sir. I will just add to what Senior Minister of State Janil has just shared.

When the SCDF and SPF learned of the technical difficulties faced by some callers, the public was informed to contact SCDF via SMS 70995 and SPF via SMS 70999. They could also report incidents via the SGSecure app.

The SCDF and SPF are conducting a comprehensive review with IMDA to evaluate additional resiliency measures including the feasibility of telco diversity for our emergency hotlines.

Just to also add, arising from that incident, there was no feedback from the public on SCDF and SPF's failure to respond to any urgent or life-threatening incident.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the Senior Minister of State and Minister of State for their replies.

Incidents like this can affect public trust in telecommunications as a reliable service. So, in assessing future response strategies, is the Ministry considering any initiatives to improve public awareness or preparedness in such outrages?

For example, I think earlier there was mention about these alternative lines. Are there plans to better educate the public on these alternative ways to assess emergency services if similar outrages affect these public channels in the future?

Sir, the work of engaging the public and educating the public on responses to crises, whether of a personal nature or a social nature, continues. We know we have a number of initiatives including, for example, Emergency Preparedness Days, we do table-top exercises around, for example, incidents that can affect our social harmony, including those involving in race and religion. A key component of all of these is, indeed, the act of communicating: how is it that we make sure that we have access to reliable information, we are able to connect with appropriate services and disseminate the information out.

So, the very short answer to Mr Yip's question is yes, and as he is aware, we are doing many of these things already, but we will continue to learn from every single incident. So, as I have noted, we are conducting a review. As Minister of State Sun has noted, MHA and IMDA are working very closely on the review of this particular incident. If there are lessons that we can extract, we will then engage with some of our efforts around public education and do that better; and it is certainly something that we will do.

I have a supplementary question for Minister of State Sun. How many people use the alternative SMS numbers 70999 and 70995 to contact the emergency services? And are other plans to raise awareness of these alternatives?

I thank the Member for the question. I do not have the specific numbers that she requested for as the Parliamentary Question (PQ) was originally directed at the Ministry of Digital Development and Information. I will come back to her if the Member were to file a separate PQ on this.

But specifically, on her comment as to the publicity around the SMS numbers, the numbers are not new. The numbers have been around for some time. There have been marketing efforts. Every time when we go out and we tell members of the public in times of emergency you can call the hotlines, we also append the SMS numbers. But I think, arising from this incident, we will be even more enthusiastic about putting out the numbers when it comes to the SMS numbers.