All SingTel services to be restored by 7am tomorrow

SINGAPORE - All fixed line, voice, broadband and mobile services will resume tomorrow following a fire at the SingTel Bukit Panjang Exchange on Wednesday afternoon, which caused an island-wide outage in Singapore.

Minister for Communications and Information Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, who visited the SingTel Bukit Panjang Exchange on Thursday evening, said that the top priority was restoring services followed by a thorough investigation on the cause of the incident.

He said he was "quite happy" with the progress and that he was pleased with how SingTel kept customers updated via social networks.

As many as 60,000 SingTel broadband customers were left with no Internet service.

According to SingTel, a total of 149 cables, of which two-thirds belonged to fibre optic network builder OpenNet, were damaged in the fire.

"We must prevent such things from happening again in future. So the most important thing is to determine what happened... Whether systems are adequate,"said Dr Yaacob.

"Our systems are becoming complex, we learn as we go along. We want to minimise the number of incidents, and in doing so, we should try and strengthen our infrastructure as much as possible."

SingTel expects all services to be restored by 7am Friday morning.