Entire infrastructure is robust; cyber attack ruled out as the cause
Singapore, 16 April 2020 – StarHub apologises unreservedly for the inconvenience caused by the intermittent disruption of home broadband services to some of its customers on 15 April 2020. Network resilience and quality are matters StarHub takes seriously, especially with more people working and studying from home during the nationwide circuit breaker. During the disruption, StarHub’s top priority was to restore services swiftly for affected customers.
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. Details will be announced to customers soon.
“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 Mr Peter Kaliaropoulos, Chief Executive, StarHub. “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 This incident was not caused by any out-of-date equipment, capacity shortage or a cyber attack.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.”
“We assure our customers that our network traffic is well below available capacity and ample redundancy has been built into our network to cater for high service levels to be delivered consistently. We will increase our efforts, review our processes, reinforce training initiatives and continue to be vigilant as robust network quality underpins our customers’ confidence in the services we provide,” Mr Kaliaropoulos added.
Information on what transpired on 15 April is as follows:
At around 11am, some customers limited to the North and North-East regions faced a brief 20-minute disruption to their fibre services. This was due to an isolated fault in a piece of network equipment. Back-up equipment took over immediately, and affected services resumed progressively for customers. The faulty equipment was forthwith replaced with a new unit, and services were closely monitored for stability.
In a separate and unrelated incident, at about 3:50pm, StarHub discovered a network issue with its Domain Name Servers (DNS) that serve home broadband customers. There was an intermittent issue in performing queries to the DNS, which resulted in some customers experiencing slow or no internet access. The issue was rectified and affected services were fully restored at 8:20pm the same day. Mobile broadband, TV, and services to enterprise customers were not impacted.
