M1 Disruption On 4 Dec Lasted More Than 4 Hours, Is 3rd-Such Incident In 2020
If you’re an M1 user, chances are you would have been affected by the large-scale outage to its fibre broadband and fixed voice services on Friday (4 Dec) night.
M1 posted about the issue at 6.40pm, after reports from customers. the telecommunications company said that all services had been restored by 10pm.
However, due to the inconvenience caused, M1 is offering all affected customers are one-time waiver on their excess mobile data usage in their next bill.
It also deeply apologised for the disruption.
Disruption lasted more than 4 hours
For M1 customers, having their Internet go down must have been dispiriting to say the least.
That’s especially since it happened on a Friday evening, when they might have been preparing to wind down over Netflix after a long week a work.
According to The Straits Times (ST), though M1 said the outage started at 6.30pm, users began posting comments about it about 1 hour before.
They came from users in Woodlands, Punggol and Jurong West.
That means that the disruption lasted more than 4 hours in total.
M1 advised customers to use mobile data
But if the disruption was in its home fibre broadband and fixed voice services, why did M1 offer a waiver for excess mobile data usage?
That’s because while they were trying to resolve the issue, the telco posted at 8.15pm to advise customers to switch over to using mobile data instead.
However, one user pointed out in a comment that there were affected users who did not have an M1 mobile data account.
Thus, he asked if M1 would be waiving their fibre broadband charges instead.
Another customer who’s not a mobile subscriber lamented how his Netflix movie night with his kids was ruined.
Another angry customer asked at least half the bill to be waived.
3rd M1 disruption in 2020
To be sure, this isn’t the 1st time this year that M1’s fibre broadband has gone down.
On 12 May, amid the ‘Circuit Breaker’, its fibre services went down for a whopping 23 hours.
Then, the very next day, they were disrupted again for about 6 hours.
At the time, M1 offered affected users a 1-week rebate off their bill in June.
It remains to be seen whether the telco will offer such a rebate this time round.
M1 fined $400,000 for May disruptions
The disruptions in May led to the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) fining M1 a princely sum of $400,000.
In a media release, the IMDA said M1 had breached the Code of Practice for Telecommunication Service Resilience 2016.
The reason for the massive outage on 12 May was a “corrupted profile database” in the telco’s Broadband Network Gateway.
This happened because M1 staff and its vendor didn’t follow prescribed procedures, IMDA added.
The 2nd incident occurred due to a “software fault in M1’s network equipment”, which had an impact on the routing of Internet traffic.
A total of about 38,000 customers were affected by both incidents.
M1 users deserve compensation
Those affected by Internet outages know the frustration that comes when you can’t get in touch with the outside world.
Thus, such disruptions really shouldn’t happen again.
However, if they do, what affected M1 customers would probably want is some sort of compensation for the lack of service that they paid for.
And that could be in the form of a waiver of their fibre broadband bills, rather than excess mobile data.
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