Emergency, business hotlines restored after Singtel landline outage

Disruption lasted over three hours before services progressively resumed by 7pm

- Sarah Koh

The hotlines of the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) and police, as well as those of hospitals and banks, could not be reached on Oct 8 in an unprecedented islandwide disruption involving Singtel's telecommunications network.

The disruption lasted for more than three hours before services progressively resumed between 6pm and 7pm.

Netizens began submitting outage reports as early as 2pm on crowdsourced outage website Downdetector when they could not get through public service hotlines. At 3.18pm, there were 2,706 reports on Downdetector.

In a Facebook post at around 4.20pm, the SCDF and police urged members of the public to use SMS instead.

“Members of the public who are experiencing difficulties reaching us at 995 or 999 can SMS SCDF at 70995 or SPF at 70999 instead,” said the police. “The safety and well-being of the public is our top priority. We will provide updates as soon as more information becomes available.”

In an update at around 6.50pm, the SCDF and police said 999 and 995 hotline services were restored.

It is not known how many people were affected by delays in reaching emergency services.

An annual statistics report released by the SCDF on Feb 21 showed it responded to 246,832 emergency calls in 2023. In 2022, it responded to 256,837 calls.

Hospitals and medical centres affected included KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), Changi General Hospital (CGH), Singapore General Hospital (SGH), SingHealth and National Cancer Centre Singapore.

KKH and SGH advised patients to contact them via e-mail since their phone lines were down.