Starhub, M1 fined $610,000 in total for service disruptions

Up to 250,000 Starhub subscribers and 18,000 M1 subscribers were affected.

The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has fined $210,000 and $400,000 on StarHub and M1, respectively, due to internet service disruptions in April and May, the agency said in an announcement.

Up to 250,000 StarHub broadband subscribers were affected for close to five hours during its service difficulty incident on 15 April. The incident was due to a StarHub staff made a configuration error during a planned network migration exercise.

IMDA said that the incident could have been prevented if StarHub had better supervised its staff during the migration exercise.

Meanwhile, M1’s service disruptions on 12 and 13 May affected up to 18,000 and 20,000 broadband subscribers, respectively.

However, the service provider was only fined for the first incident, as the software fault for the 13 May disruption was a first of its kind for such equipment and M1 could not have reasonably foreseen and prevented the incident, according to IMDA.

The first incident was reportedly due to a corrupted profile database in M1’s Broadband Network Gateway, which disrupted services for approximately 18,000 M1 broadband subscribers for 23 hours, from 7AM on 12 May to 6AM on 13 May.

The first incident occurred because M1’s staff and vendor had not followed prescribed procedures, according to IMDA.