Citizens found themselves unable to pay for a host of government services online on Tuesday, after eNets went down for 11 hours.
The problem happened because the company that runs the Internet payment scheme failed to renew its domain name, a check by The Straits Times showed.
The company, Network for Electronic Transfers Singapore (Nets), had to re-register its enets.sg Web address by midnight, before it expired. But the renewal did not appear on a national registry of domain names until late Tuesday morning.
In the meantime, many users could not pay for all kinds of government services, from season parking to passports and road tax.
It has now been extended for another year.
Software architect Kelvin Chua, 49, alerted The Straits Times to the problem. He said he could not book badminton courts from the Singapore Sports Council as the service was down. Mr Chua, who has been working in the IT field for 14 years, said that what had upset him was the complacency of the service provider. 'If the service is so critical, why then didn't Nets renew something as basic as its domain name?' he said.
'No one is saying that the system must be up 100 per cent. This is worse than the MRT train breakdown.
'What if the domain name expires on a Saturday afternoon, and Monday is a holiday? Should users be at the mercy of some organisation's incompetence?'
Mr Michael Araneta, associate director for consulting and research at IDC Financial Insights, said an organisation with tight internal processes would not fail to overlook a simple procedure such as domain name renewal. 'But then again, outages can be caused not necessarily by sophisticated systems, but also by simple acts of omission,' he said.
The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore said last night: 'We understand that there was an eNets outage which caused inconvenience to users accessing government e-services. Services have since been restored and we are investigating the matter.'
The problem happened because the company that runs the Internet payment scheme failed to renew its domain name, a check by The Straits Times showed.
The company, Network for Electronic Transfers Singapore (Nets), had to re-register its enets.sg Web address by midnight, before it expired. But the renewal did not appear on a national registry of domain names until late Tuesday morning.
In the meantime, many users could not pay for all kinds of government services, from season parking to passports and road tax.
It has now been extended for another year.
Software architect Kelvin Chua, 49, alerted The Straits Times to the problem. He said he could not book badminton courts from the Singapore Sports Council as the service was down. Mr Chua, who has been working in the IT field for 14 years, said that what had upset him was the complacency of the service provider. 'If the service is so critical, why then didn't Nets renew something as basic as its domain name?' he said.
'No one is saying that the system must be up 100 per cent. This is worse than the MRT train breakdown.
'What if the domain name expires on a Saturday afternoon, and Monday is a holiday? Should users be at the mercy of some organisation's incompetence?'
Mr Michael Araneta, associate director for consulting and research at IDC Financial Insights, said an organisation with tight internal processes would not fail to overlook a simple procedure such as domain name renewal. 'But then again, outages can be caused not necessarily by sophisticated systems, but also by simple acts of omission,' he said.
The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore said last night: 'We understand that there was an eNets outage which caused inconvenience to users accessing government e-services. Services have since been restored and we are investigating the matter.'
.... b4 all their cpf moni is gone ... 
