Fibre services & bus ETA system restored on Apr. 19 morning following outage caused by construction works

Fibre broadband services in parts of Ang Mo Kio, Bishan, Sengkang and Punggol have been fully restored as of 7am, Apr. 19.

The update on the resolution of the outage was shared by telco infrastructure provider NetLink Trust in a statement on Apr. 19.

About 5,000 users were affected by the outage and included customers of Singtel, Starhub and M1.

The disruption also affected the ETA (estimated time of arrival) system for buses, resulting in inaccurate bus timings and long wait timings being displayed at bus stops and on mobile apps, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) said in a separate statement on Apr. 18.

The system has also been restored on the morning of Apr. 19, following the resumption of telco services.

Outage caused by construction works

According to NetLink Trust, the disruption was caused by damage to fibre infrastructure during third-party construction works.

In an earlier statement at 3pm on Apr. 18, NetLink Trust said they had not engaged the "errant third-party contractor".

Meanwhile, LTA revealed in their Apr. 18 statement that fibre service cables were damaged during contiguous bored pile works for the North–South Corridor project.

This resulted in disruptions to some telco services and the bus arrival ETA system, which relies on the affected cables.

"We take incidents affecting essential telecommunications services seriously and are conducting a thorough review. Appropriate follow-up actions will be taken after investigations are completed," NetLink Trust said.

Top left image via Canva, right image via LTA