While patient care remained unaffected, the seven-hour disruption to public healthcare websites raises questions about IT reliability.
SINGAPORE – On November 7, all public sector healthcare institutions in Singapore faced a significant website outage that lasted for more than seven hours, leaving citizens shocked and questioning the stability of government IT systems. The interruption affected websites and e-mail services across the entire public healthcare system, not just a single institution. This raised concerns about the lack of backup systems and whether the issue could have been caused by a cyber attack.
Despite fears about a breach, Synapxe, the tech platform manager for national healthcare institutions, reassured the public that there was no evidence suggesting a compromise of sensitive data or internal networks. Fortunately, patient care was not disrupted during the outage, as healthcare providers continued treating patients without delay.
While the disruption was an inconvenience, it did not derail critical services like it might in sectors such as banking. Healthcare providers do not face the same level of responsibility for uptime as financial institutions. For example, banks are required by the Monetary Authority of Singapore to ensure their critical systems can be restored within four hours in case of a failure, due to the direct impact on financial transactions and customer services. Healthcare websites, however, serve more administrative functions such as appointment bookings, bill payments, and service inquiries. A few hours of downtime, though inconvenient, does not have a severe impact on patient care.
The event is reminiscent of the 2018 cyber attack on SingHealth systems, where 1.5 million patient records were stolen, leading to a $750,000 fine for Integrated Health Information Systems (Synapxe’s predecessor). While the 2018 breach was far more severe, the recent outage reignited concerns about the vulnerability of healthcare systems and their ability to ensure security and uptime.
More than 24 hours after the outage, Synapxe had not yet provided a clear explanation for the cause. The incident, while not catastrophic in terms of service disruption, has shaken public trust in the efficiency and security of government IT platforms. The real fallout from this event lies in the potential erosion of confidence in the government’s ability to safeguard its systems from failures and attacks in the future.
