Experts uncover root cause of CPF website glitch

It couldn’t stand high member traffic.

An investigation by the CPF Board (CPFB) and its IT vendor, Microsoft, has identified the root cause of the technical issues which caused CPF e-services to go offline early this month.

Following an in-depth review, Microsoft’s global subject matter experts have determined the root cause of the technical issues to be an integration component used by the website, which had not functioned as intended under situations of high member traffic. 

This caused the wrong display of information in a few isolated cases, which prompted the CPF Board to take the system offline as a safeguard.

CPF e-services are still only partially available as of writing. Selected e-services catering to 70 percent of all online transactions have been made available since Wednesday, 2 December 2015. 

“We apologise to members for the inconvenience caused. Much as we would like to bring the e-services online as quickly as possible, we cannot afford to compromise the stability and reliability of the e-services. We are working round the clock with Microsoft and all necessary resources have been mobilised to conduct thorough functional and load testing. We will update members on the restoration of the CPF e-services once the effectiveness of the technical solutions have been robustly validated,” said Ng Chee Peng, Chief Executive Officer of CPFB.