StarHub internet goes down at the worst possible time; no evidence of cyberattack

[UPDATED: Apr 15, 9.15pm]

Starhub issued a statement at 8.45pm that all affected services were fully restored as of 8.20pm today.

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For Starhub customers today (Apr 15), the internet went down in the worst of times — during the circuit breaker period when the majority of the country are working and studying at home. 

The telco’s internet service faced intermittent outage issues earlier this morning, with fibre connection services to customers in the north and north-east regions impacted for about 20 minutes. 

This, according to StarHub in a Facebook post at 3.45pm, was due to a fault in network equipment. 

“Backup equipment took over immediately and affected services started to resume progressively,” the telco assured, advising customers to reboot their modems and routers to refresh their data connection. 

Down Detector noted that the issues started just after 11am. 

Internet outage at home is a bummer regardless of day and time, but this one was particularly exasperating. After all, the heightened measures against the coronavirus outbreak have driven everyone to stay at home and get stuff done, and these days, everything gets done over the internet. 

You can bet that everyone affected aired their grievances on social media. Through 4G mobile data, we can only presume. 

Some customers are even asserting that the internet outage is affecting residences beyond just the north and north-eastern parts of Singapore. 

Right now, the StarHub outage map on Down Detector is showing that the entire island is being affected. 

In the latest update, StarHub assured that there was no evidence of a cyberattack. The network issue with one of its Domain Name Servers has also been rectified, said the company. 

If the issue lies with the DNS — a digital phonebook of sorts that translate the URLs you key in into an IP address — perhaps changing the DNS settings on your device could get you up and running again. 

“Restoration of services is being closely monitored,” noted StarHub, promising to provide further updates in the road to full internet service restoration. 

In response, StarHub's Chief Technology Officer Chong Siew Loong also said: "We apologise deeply for the inconvenience caused by the intermittent disruption of home broadband services to some of our customers today. We are monitoring the progressive restoration of services closely, and will provide an update once all affected services have been fully resumed. We confirm that broadband services to enterprise customers are unaffected.

"Traffic on our network is well below our available capacity and ample redundancy has been built into our network to cater for high service levels to be delivered consistently. The disruption arose due to a network issue with one of our Domain Name Servers that handles internet traffic routing, which has since been rectified.

"We take this incident seriously and will conduct a detailed root cause analysis so that we can prevent future recurrence. We would like to thank you for your patience and understanding."

ilyas@asiaone.com