HEALTHCARE IT DISRUPTION RESILIENCE

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1470

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR ORAL ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON 3 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Mr Yip Hon Weng

MP for Yio Chu Kang

Question No. 3238

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health regarding the multi-cluster healthcare system disruptions on 13 October 2026 (a) how will the Ministry monitor and resolve longer-term impacts on patient care; (b) why critical healthcare infrastructure lacked real-time redundancy to prevent operational disruption; and (c) what accountability frameworks will be enforced against institutions and their vendors to uphold service standards.

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1486

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR ORAL ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON 3 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Ms Poh Li San

MP for Sembawang West

Question No. 3264

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health (a) what are the findings on the cause of disruptions to multiple healthcare services on 13 October 2026 that affected all three public healthcare cluster; (b) what is the reason for the prolonged nine-hour duration before services were recovered; (c) whether there are backup systems that can be activated; and (d) how many appointments have been missed or cancelled as a result.

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1497

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR ORAL ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON 3 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Ms Joan Pereira

MP for Tanjong Pagar GRC

Question No. 3281

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health regarding the widespread system disruptions across all three public healthcare clusters on 13 October 2026 (a) what are the causes; (b) what is the estimated number of patients affected; (c) whether there is backup infrastructure in place; (d) if so, why did the backup infrastructure fail to prevent this disruption; and (e) what remediation steps are being taken to strengthen operational resilience.

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1520

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR ORAL ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON 3 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Ms Cassandra Lee,

MP for West Coast-Jurong West GRC

Question No. 3388

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health (a) whether the investigation into the 13 October 2026 service disruptions across the three public healthcare clusters has been completed; and (b) whether the Ministry is considering measures, such as redundancy systems, to mitigate future disruptions to digital services.

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1473

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR ORAL ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON OR AFTER 4 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Dr Hamid Razak

MP for West Coast-Jurong West GRC

Question No. 3246

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health following the service disruption to the public healthcare sector on 13 October 2026 (a) how is the public healthcare network designed to prevent a single connectivity failure from disrupting services across all public healthcare clusters; and (b) whether this design will be reviewed in light of the investigation’s findings.

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1507

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR ORAL ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON OR AFTER 4 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong

MP for Hougang GRC

Question No. 3308

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health (a) whether the Ministry has identified any common point of failure that contributed to the 13 October 2026 IT systems disruption affecting all three public healthcare clusters; and (b) what enhancements to the redundancy, resilience and business continuity of shared healthcare IT systems will be implemented to reduce the risk of future system-wide disruptions.

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1473

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR WRITTEN ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON 3 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Mr Yip Hon Weng

MP for Yio Chu Kang

Question No. 2263

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health regarding the multi-cluster healthcare outages on 13 October 2026 (a) whether the public healthcare IT systems has adequate operational capacity to manage concurrent islandwide failures; and (b) whether the Ministry will consider requiring the decentralisation of core IT systems into isolated cluster instances to eliminate single points of failure.

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1504

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR WRITTEN ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON 3 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Dr Haresh Singaraju

Nominated MP

Question No. 2298

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health (a) whether the public healthcare IT disruption on 13 October 2026 arose from a planned change; (b) if not, what is the cause; (c) whether the IT system shared by all three clusters has an independent fallback; (d) what maximum restoration time applies to such system and whether it has been met; and (e) whether these findings will be published.

NOTICE PAPER NO. 1517

NOTICE OF QUESTION FOR WRITTEN ANSWER

FOR THE SITTING OF PARLIAMENT ON 3 NOVEMBER 2026

Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament

Dr Wan Rizal,

MP for Jalan Besar GRC

Question No. 2334

To ask the Coordinating Minister for Social Policies and Minister for Health regarding the public healthcare IT disruption on 13 October 2026 (a) how were the frontline staff supported to keep patient care safe while affected systems were down; (b) what additional workload has been absorbed by them; and (c) whether downtime procedures and staff training will be reviewed.

Answer

          Mr Speaker, may I have your permission to address Questions 41 to 44 in the Order Paper together? My reply will also cover the related Written Questions on today's Order Paper, as well as the questions filed for subsequent sitting.

2          The disruption on 13 October caused inconvenience and concern to patients and their families, and created additional work for our healthcare workers. We apologise. It should not have happened. The investigation found that this was not a cyberattack, and there was no unauthorised access to, compromise or loss of patient data.

3          The cause was a required security update to a shared Domain Name System, or DNS, service that was not completed before a scheduled global change. DNS works like an internet address book, helping systems locate and connect to applications. This was a known change and a preventable lapse.

4          Synapxe had contracted a service provider to manage the necessary update, but it was not carried out. Synapxe is reviewing the provider's contractual obligations and will take appropriate action for any established lapses. Regardless of the outsourcing arrangement, Synapxe remains accountable for the resilience of its critical systems.

5          The disruption lasted about nine and a half hours. Monitoring detected abnormal activity, but it took time to identify the underlying problem and restore services safely. Synapxe is strengthening monitoring and fault diagnosis to enable faster recovery.

6          Our public healthcare systems have backup infrastructure, including two data centres. However, both depended on the same underlying DNS service and security configuration. Switching between them would therefore not have resolved this particular disruption. Synapxe will review such shared dependencies and strengthen alternative recovery arrangements.

7          Services affected included appointment bookings, visitor registration, medication dispensing and billing. Healthcare institutions activated downtime procedures, with additional staff supporting operations and clinicians using selected read-only patient records and manual workflows to continue essential care. About 4,000 outpatient appointments were rescheduled, and some patients experienced delays of up to two hours. No adverse patient-safety incidents were attributed to the disruption in this case.

8          We are strengthening resilience in three areas: one, prevention, by improving the tracking and verification of critical technical changes; second, containment, by addressing shared dependencies and improving recovery arrangements; and third, ensuring the continuity of care, by improving downtime systems, staff readiness and regular exercises, including for partial outages.

9          MOH will oversee the corrective actions and verify that they are effective. Synapxe has appointed an expert panel comprising representatives from other organisations that have similar engineering profiles to review the investigation findings and proposed remediation measures and identify further improvements.

10          Digitalisation brings important benefits to healthcare. But as our systems become more interconnected, resilience must improve too. We must make our technology more reliable, while ensuring healthcare workers can continue caring for patients safely even when technology fails.