Most ‘down’ govt websites back up and running now

Most of the 484 government-run websites of Bangladesh National Portal, which were suspended for a couple of days along with 62 sensitive sites like Bangabhaban, Prime Minister's Office, cabinet and different ministries due to overload of information in server, are up and running now.

Visitors will be able to avail of services from those sites once again, as they have identified and fixed the issue, said officials.

Over 700 websites initially experienced the malfunction, the websites of government offices and directorates were facing the problem till last evening.

This correspondent was unable to access at least 10 government-run websites including Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges and UGC -- those were found functional since yesterday evening.

"All websites will be operational from tonight onwards," said Mohammad Arfe Elahi, chief technology officer (CTO) of Access to Information (a2i) programme under PMO.

The servers faced technical glitches for a few days due to recent increase in traffic and uploading of contents on the websites. They have already fixed the issue and were waiting for DNS propagation -- a time frame needed for any DNS changes like IP address update across the internet, a2i officials said yesterday.

A member of Portal Implementation Team of a2i told The Daily Star on Sunday that they had 33,000 sites which include government offices.

"We host these websites under two centre -- one at Bangladesh Computer Council's National Data Centre and another under Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited," informed Arfe Elahi.

"On Wednesday night our monitoring team saw that the capacity of the data centre server got overwhelmed due to heavy traffic," he added.

"We have informed the ministries that we will be able to finish server extensions within today [yesterday]," he added.