About 185 HDB car parks affected by global IT outage, barriers lifted for motorists to go through

UPDATE on Jul. 20 at 4:55 pm: The Housing & Development Board (HDB) has updated their Facebook post to state that the affected car parks have resumed normal operations.

Following the major global IT outage on Jul. 19, numerous services in Singapore, including the city-state's car parks, were impacted.

In a Facebook post around 7 pm, the Housing & Development Board (HDB) reported that approximately 185 or 10 per cent of car parks in HDB estates had been affected by the outage.

The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) also said that about 11 of its public car parks with barriers were affected by the network outage, Lianhe Zaobao reported.

Motorists stranded in car parks

At around 5 pm, user Jaames Yeo took to Facebook to share that he was unable to exit his HDB car park for about 30 minutes.

He mentioned receiving no assistance from the Town Council or HDB via their phone lines, prompting motorists to take matters into their own hands.

One woman even used tools to remove the barrier, allowing drivers to exit.

A commenter mentioned that the same thing occurred at a multi-storey car park along Depot Road and that a driver removed the barrier there too.

Barriers lifted to allow motorists to enter and exit

HDB stated in their post that the barrier arms of affected parking gantries were raised to facilitate quick entry and exit for motorists.

Ground staff from the affected car park operator were also deployed to assist drivers.

"We apologise for the inconvenience caused, and seek motorists’ understanding and patience as we work with our service vendor to resolve the issue," said HDB.

The affected car parks are progressively resuming normal operations, it added.

URA also raised the gates of its affected car parks, with no levy imposed on drivers until the issue is resolved with the designated car park operators.

Photos of lifted barriers were posted on Facebook group SG Road Vigilante.

No legal action for barrier removal

Drivers who remove malfunctioning barriers may not need to worry about legal repercussions.

In a 2018 Facebook post, HDB explained that a motorist who had been spotted removing a barrier was advised via the car park intercom to do so due to a malfunction.

As such, no action was taken against the motorist.

Cause of outage

CrowdStrike, a U.S.-based cybersecurity provider, has released a statement to say that the outage stemmed from a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts.

The company added that it was not a cyberattack.

The issue has since been identified and isolated, with a fix deployed.

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Top photos from Jaames Yeo/Facebook and SG Road Vigilante/Facebook