Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) fined Singtel S$1 million after finding that mobile-service disruptions affecting about 720,000 subscribers on three days in March could have been prevented.
The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) said the affected group included consumer and business subscribers. The disruptions occurred March 16, 18 and 19, 2026. Its investigation ruled out a cyberattack.
The first outage followed scheduled maintenance at a Singtel exchange on March 16. IMDA found that a Singtel vendor left a manual water valve closed and that Singtel had no active monitoring of the valve or water flow. Cooling failed, equipment overheated and mobile service was disrupted for about nine hours.
After that failure, 5G traffic was redirected to another exchange. Some subscribers experienced intermittent connections on the evenings of March 18 and 19. IMDA found that the receiving exchange faced heavier traffic while a packet optimizer was disabled and a software bug affected its systems. The regulator said Singtel should have ensured the exchange could handle the additional load.
A separate software bug affected about 2,000 customers on March 17, the Ministry of Digital Development and Information said in an April parliamentary reply. March 17 was not among the three dates covered by this penalty.
IMDA said it considered Singtel’s cooperation, gradual restoration of service and goodwill rebates of S$5 to S$10 when setting the fine. Singtel has strengthened cooling checks, addressed problems at the receiving exchange and tested how its network switches traffic during failures.
The regulator also fined Singtel S$1 million in December 2025 over an October 2024 fixed-voice outage. That disruption affected about 500,000 users, including access to some emergency call services.
In April, the ministry said IMDA was reviewing Singapore’s telecom service resilience rules. It gave no date for a decision.
