SINGAPORE - M1 users around Singapore were hit by a fibre broadband outage on Friday (Dec 4) that lasted for more than four hours, in the third such disruption to the telco's services this year. Fixed voice services were also affected.

The outage was first reported by M1 on its Facebook page at 6.40pm, although comments from affected users in areas such as Woodlands, Punggol and Jurong West began surfacing about an hour earlier.

The telco said in an update at 10pm that all affected services had been fully restored. Its post had drawn 6,100 comments by then.

"M1 users affected by this disruption will be offered a one-time waiver on their excess mobile data usage in their next M1 bill," said M1, apologising for the inconvenience caused.

According to the Downdetector website, which logs Internet outages, M1 started having problems at around 5.50pm, before complaints spiked at 6.45pm with around 9,800 reports.

M1 said its fibre and fixed voice services were disrupted at 6.30pm, affecting users in "some parts of Singapore".

Sembawang resident Khairul Anwar Sayali, 34, said his broadband connection went down at 6.15pm when he was watching Netflix. It was restored about two hours later.

"I wasn't badly affected, but some of my friends were in Zoom meetings for work or doing assignments, and it might not have looked good for them to (lose their) connection," said Mr Khairul, who works in estate management.

"But nobody wants this to happen, and I'm sure the engineers and everyone involved were trying their best to resolve the issue."

Taman Jurong resident Petrus Tan, 59, was in the midst of an online meeting at 6.15pm when his connection was cut off.

His smart home appliances such as an air purifier and robot vacuum cleaner which are controlled by apps that require a network connection also could not be operated.

Despite the glitch, Mr Tan said he has no plans to switch telcos.

"I have been using M1 since 1997, and I will still stay with them as the price is cheaper," he said.

"Singtel and StarHub have also had such incidents before."

The latest incident followed two previous disruptions during Singapore's circuit breaker period that lasted for almost 30 hours collectively from May 12 to 13.

The first was due to a corrupted profile database in the telco's broadband network gateway, while the second was caused by a software fault occurring in the telco's network equipment.

M1 was fined $400,000 by the Infocomm Media Development Authority in September.