Singapore: IMDA Fines Singtel S$1m Over March Outages Affecting 720,000 Users

The penalty

Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) announced on October 20 a S$1 million (US$782,000) financial penalty on telecommunications operator Singtel. Its investigation concluded the three mobile service disruptions on March 16, 18 and 19 were preventable, within Singtel's control, and not caused by a cyberattack. About 720,000 consumer and business subscribers were affected.

The March 16 disruption was the worst, lasting about nine hours and affecting both 4G and 5G services. Customers began experiencing connectivity problems at around 10:30am; 4G services were restored by about 1:30pm, while 5G returned progressively from 2:45pm before full connectivity was restored at around 8pm. IMDA traced the outage to a failed cooling system at a Singtel exchange, where mobile network equipment overheated and shut down — a vendor had failed to reopen a manual valve controlling water flow after scheduled maintenance, and Singtel lacked active monitoring of the valves or water flow.

The disruptions on March 18 and 19 followed the diversion of 5G traffic to another exchange: increased traffic, a disabled network packet optimiser and a software bug caused intermittent connectivity on the evenings of both days. The March 18 disruption was resolved within an hour.

Singtel accepts the ruling

In deciding the penalty, IMDA considered the scale of the disruptions, Singtel's cooperation with the investigation and recovery efforts, and about S$8 million in goodwill rebates (S$5 to S$10 for affected customers). Responding to media queries, Singtel chief executive officer Ng Tian Chong confirmed the company accepted IMDA's ruling and the penalty: "We deeply regret the disruption and the inconvenience caused to our customers." Singtel has since improved cooling-system maintenance and monitoring, rectified systems at the other exchange and conducted exercises to test traffic switching during failures.

Context: IMDA also fined Singtel S$1 million in December 2025 over a landline outage in October 2024.