The central bank's Credit Information Bureau server collapsed once again yesterday -- less than 24 hours after it was brought back to working order after an abrupt shutdown of seven days.

The latest disruption means banks' lending activities are on pause again.

The CIB report, which informs on the clients' credit status, must be collected from the central bank's server to sanction, extend or renew any loan.

Banks are not allowed to provide any loan if the CIB report, which was put up online in July 2011, informs that the clients are defaulters.

Earlier on March 6, the CIB server and some other segments of the central bank's data centre had collapsed due to failure of the cooling system.

A BB official told The Daily Star yesterday that the CIB server was brought to order at 5:00pm on Monday, but it collapsed again at 11:00am yesterday due to failure of the hard disks.

Some portion of the central bank's disaster recovery centre has not been operating in the last few months. As a result, the banks failed to get CIB report from the disaster recovery centre located in Mirpur, he said. The disaster recovery centre operates as back-up of the data centre. “It looks bad on the central bank that both the data centre and the disaster recovery station are out of order at the same time,” he said.

The central bank's information technology team had tried to repair the server yesterday but as of 6:15pm it remained out of order, the BB official added.