The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has fined telecom operator Singapore Telecommunications (Singtel) SGD$1MN ($774MN) for a disruption to fixed-line voice traffic that affected public access to customer service lines for some government agencies, healthcare organizations, banks, and companies, as well as emergency call services.
The incident, which occurred on October 8 last year, affected around 500,000 of Singtel’s residential and corporate users for over four hours after Singtel’s virtualized firewall system malfunctioned.
The regulator found in an investigation that Singtel hosted two separate virtualized firewalls that shared the same hardware memory, one for its fixed-line voice system and another for the monitoring system for its home broadband routers and Pay TV set-top boxes.
When traffic to the monitoring system spiked on October 8, the system’s virtualized firewall did not have adequate filters to protect the hardware. This overloaded the shared memory resources and disrupted the voice system’s virtualized firewall, causing it to operate intermittently.
That intermittency meant that the automatic failover mechanism did not seamlessly redirect voice traffic to a separate system at an unaffected site. As traffic alternated between the affected and unaffected systems, calls were dropped intermittently. The incident was resolved when the telco fully transferred all voice traffic to the unaffected system.
Singtel Fine Shows Infrastructure Design Is Now a Core CX Issue
Despite the growth of mobile and digital channels, fixed voice services remain critical for emergency access, healthcare organizations and legacy systems. Outages in fixed voice services disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, who rely on these services as their primary means of communication.
Given the disruption to contact with emergency services and government agencies, IMDA stated that it “takes a serious view of the incident and conducted a thorough investigation.”
The regulator imposed the maximum fine on Singtel under Singapore’s Telecommunications Act, which allows it to enforce a penalty of up to SGD$1MN or 10 percent of the company’s annual turnover.
