In October 2021, an anonymous Instagram account accused Night Owl Cinematics co-founder Sylvia Chan of verbally abusing staff and running a toxic workplace, unleashing leaked audio, sponsor boycotts and one of Singapore's biggest influencer scandals.
Night Owl Cinematics, or NOC, was founded in February 2013 by married couple Ryan Tan and Sylvia Chan after a failed restaurant venture. Starting in wedding videography, they pivoted to YouTube, where videos like Shit Singaporean Girlfriends Say, laced with Hokkien and Singlish, made them pioneers of Singapore's creator economy. Tan handled the creative side while Chan ran the business.
The personal unravelled first: the couple announced in May 2020 that their divorce had been finalised that March after three years of separation, with Tan later saying the business had been 95 per cent of the reason for the split. Then came the professional detonation. On October 7, 2021, the anonymous account @sgcickenrice published allegations that Chan screamed at employees, fostered a toxic culture, and had sought an exit strategy to push out a talent named Samantha Tan. Leaked audio clips purporting to capture Chan berating staff circulated widely.
The backlash was immediate. Brands including Colgate and Milo cut ties with the company. NOC's first response labelled the claims a massive smear campaign and hinted at privacy-law breaches, drawing a lawyer's letter in return asserting the allegations had not been proven untrue. On October 13, Chan apologised, acknowledging she had not lived up to the standards expected of her, and was removed from NOC's artiste line-up. Samantha Tan publicly disputed inaccuracies in the apology, keeping the saga alive for weeks.
The scandal metastasised through a near-two-hour interview Chan gave to fellow influencer Xiaxue, which dragged the couple's divorce, infidelity allegations and company finances into public view, and through Ryan Tan's own rebuttals. Years later, Chan revealed on her podcast that the saga had triggered a 12-month police investigation involving more than a hundred reports against her, covering allegations from embezzlement to prostitution, which she said left her terrified of being treated as a criminal.
NOC is now defunct, Chan briefly joined creator company Gushcloud as a regional media strategist before retraining as a life coach, and Tan runs his own channel. The saga remains the defining scandal of Singapore's influencer era: a case study in toxic-workplace allegations, cancel culture and crisis management gone wrong.
The affair also reshaped Singapore's creator economy, as brands grew warier of tying campaigns to individual influencers and talent agencies introduced clearer workplace policies. For a generation of YouTubers who had grown up idolising NOC, the scandal was a sobering lesson in how quickly an empire built on personality can collapse.