Power Supply Failure: 30,000 govt websites go offline

More than 30,000 government websites of the Bangladesh National Portal were inaccessible since yesterday morning due to an electrical fault in the Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited server.

The problem arose when the inverter of the BTCL's server burnt, said officials of the government's Access to Information (a2i) project and BTCL.

Arfe Elahi, chief technical officer of a2i, told The Daily Star yesterday, "BTCL's power supply was cut off around 9:45am today [Sunday]. We have most of our servers under BTCL and we couldn't run those servers on without the power connection. There is no problem with the portal or the server.

"We are working with our full team to reconnect the servers. It will take the whole night to fix it. More than 30,000 government websites have been shut down," he added.

It marks the second time in two weeks that government servers have gone down. Last month, 484 government-run websites were suspended, including 62 sensitive websites like those of the Bangabhaban, Prime Minister's Office (PMO), cabinet and different ministries, due to overload of information in the server.

Since the disconnection of power supply to BTCL's servers in Moghbazar, the websites of various ministries, departments and offices, directorates, agencies and government offices at the field level could not be accessed, said officials of a2i and BTCL.

The websites of Ministry of Public Administration, Ministry of Education, Local Government Department could not be accessed since this morning. The websites of departments and organisations, including the Department of Food, Department of Disaster Management, Department of Secondary and Higher Education, were inaccessible at 9:00pm last night, when this report was filed.

The websites showed the message, "Site off-line: The site is currently not available due to technical problems. Please try again later. Thank you for your understanding."