IMDA Fines Singtel S$1 Million Over March Service Outages

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) fined Singtel S$1 million for mobile service disruptions that occurred on March 16, 18, and 19, 2026. The outages affected approximately 720,000 consumer and business subscribers. The regulator concluded the incidents were preventable, within the company's control, and not the result of a cyberattack.

Investigations revealed the initial disruption on March 16 was caused by a chiller system failure at an exchange. A vendor failed to reopen a manual water valve after maintenance, causing equipment to overheat; IMDA further noted that Singtel lacked active monitoring of these valves. Subsequent outages on March 18 and 19 occurred when redirected 5G traffic overwhelmed a second exchange that was hampered by a software bug and a disabled network packet optimiser.

In determining the penalty, IMDA considered the scale of the impact alongside Singtel's full cooperation and the distribution of S$8 million in goodwill rebates to affected customers. Singtel CEO Ng Tian Chong accepted the ruling and expressed regret for the inconvenience. The company has since updated its maintenance procedures, strengthened chiller maintenance, and improved network failover testing.