Banks' lending activities ground to a halt for a week until last evening due to the abrupt collapse of the central bank's Credit Information Bureau server on March 6.

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.

The CIB server was brought to order last evening, said Debashish Chakrabortty, spokesperson of the Bangladesh Bank.

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

It took the central bank nearly a week to resolve the technical problem as the repairs needed were done step by step, said another BB official.  

“We have been forced to stop our credit activities largely in the last few days. We failed to sanction fresh loans and extend or renew the existing ones,” said Syed Mahbubur Rahman, managing director of Dhaka Bank.

Rahman, also the chairman of the Association of Bankers, Bangladesh, a forum of banks' chief executive officers, said that the central bank had not even informed the banks about the server breakdown.

“We could not sanction any credit since last Tuesday,” said a senior executive of a private commercial bank.

It is unprecedented that the central bank's key server has been out of service for nearly a week and without any notice, he added.