SINGAPORE - The hotlines of the Singapore Civil Defence Force and police, as well as those of hospitals and banks, could not be reached on Oct 8 in an unprecedented islandwide disruption on Singtel's telecommunications network.

The disruption lasted for more than three hours, before services progressively resumed between 6pm and 7pm.

Netizens began submitting outage reports as early as 2pm on crowdsourced outage website Downdetector when they could not get through public service hotlines. At 3.18pm, there were 2,706 reports on Downdetector.

In a Facebook post at around 4.20pm, the SCDF and police urged members of the public to use SMS instead.

"Members of the public who are experiencing difficulties reaching us at 995 or 999 can SMS SCDF at 70995 or SPF at 70999 instead," said the police. "The safety and well-being of the public is our top priority. We will provide updates as soon as more information becomes available."

In an update at around 7pm, the force said that 999 and 995 hotline services were restored.

It is not known how many people were affected by delays in reaching emergency services.

An annual statistics report released by the SCDF on Feb 21 showed the force responded to 246,832 emergency calls in 2023. In 2022, they responded to 256,837 calls.

Hospitals and medical centres affected include KK Women's and Children's Hospital, Changi General Hospital (CGH), Singapore General Hospital (SGH), SingHealth and the National Cancer Centre Singapore.

KK Women's and Children's Hospital and SGH had advised patients to contact them via e-mail since its phone lines were down.

CGH, SingHealth and the National Cancer Centre Singapore directed patients to use the SingHealth Health Buddy app for appointments, medication orders and billing services.

A National University Hospital System spokesperson said the organisation was alerted to intermittent connection issues affecting its' phone lines in the afternoon, due to the disruption.

"Our patients were, however, still able to manage their appointments or send in their queries via the NUHS app and our e-mail channels," said the spokesperson, adding that its phone lines were fully restored by 5.35pm.

The customer service hotlines of DBS, OCBC and UOB also did not work, with the banks advising customers to use their banking apps instead.

In its Facebook post at around 4.50pm, DBS also said: "We have also been informed by Nets that this industry-wide issue may also impact transactions, such as QR, credit and debit, and Nets card transactions, via some Nets terminals."

Payment via DBS' PayLah! and the national PayNow instant fund transfer services were not affected, said DBS.

Other public hotlines affected were those of SimplyGo, a unified ticketing system by the Land Transport Authority, and Changi Airport.

A Singtel spokesman acknowledged the problem at around 3.45pm. Its first post on Facebook went out at around 4.30pm noting that some of its customers including public service hotlines "may be experiencing intermittent fixed voice service issues".

It added: "Our mobile services are unaffected. Our engineers are working urgently to resolve the matter. We apologise for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience."

In an update posted on its Facebook at 5.07pm, the telco said: "Our engineers have isolated the problem affecting our fixed voice services. Recovery measures are being rapidly deployed and services are progressively being restored."

Most public service hotlines were restored by around 7pm.

ST has contacted Singtel and the Infocomm Media Development Authority for more information about the cause of the disruption.

This article was first published in The Straits Times. Permission required for reproduction.