Websites of Singapore public hospitals, polyclinics back up after hours-long 'internet access disruption'

SINGAPORE: The websites of all public hospitals and polyclinics in Singapore gradually came back online on Wednesday evening (Nov 1) after a disruption that started at about 9.20am.

Users had reported errors when trying to access the sites, which showed messages saying that URLs could not be retrieved.

The issue was due to an “internet access disruption” affecting all public healthcare clusters, the national health agency Synapxe said at about 1.45pm.

“Services requiring internet applications like websites, emails and the NUHS (National University Health System) contact centre are inaccessible.”

It added that clinical services within the public healthcare network, such as access to patient records, remain accessible and unaffected.

In an update at about 11pm, Synapxe said that internet connectivity had been restored and that there was no evidence to suggest data and internal networks were compromised.

Internet connectivity at public healthcare institutions were progressively restored from 4.30pm and most affected services were restored by 5.15pm, it said in a Facebook post.

Investigations into the outage of internet connectivity are ongoing, said Synapxe.

“We have found no evidence to indicate that our data and internal networks have been compromised,” it added.

Synapxe, whose website was also down, supports the operations of 46 public healthcare institutions. These include acute hospitals and polyclinics, as well as around 1,400 community partners such as nursing homes and general practitioners.

Singapore’s public healthcare system is grouped into three clusters – SingHealth which runs hospitals and polyclinics in the east, the National Healthcare Group in the central region and NUHS in the west.

The websites of Singapore General Hospital, National University Hospital and Tan Tock Seng Hospital were among those affected, as with that of the Agency for Integrated Care (AIC).

The Ministry of Health and HealthHub websites were not affected.

In response to CNA’s queries, NUHS and SingHealth said clinical services remained accessible and were unaffected.

Clinic and hospital operations continued as normal, NUHS added, noting that although some features of the OneNUHS app were temporarily unavailable, patients could still manage their appointments via the app.

“We are working closely with Synapxe, our public healthcare IT partner, to monitor the situation closely,” said NUHS.