Freelancing site Upwork resumes service after being blocked for 14hrs

Upwork, the world’s largest freelancing website, has resumed its service this morning after fourteen hours of being blocked in Bangladesh.

Officials of Upwork acknowledged that the problem occurred in Bangladesh and said this problem also widely impacted their clients sitting across the globe along with the thousands of freelances of the country.

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) blocked the site around 9:30pm yesterday and resumed it again today at 11:30am.

Definitely it creates problems for both the freelancers and people who ordered work, said Saidur Mamun Khan, head of Marketing and Data Operations at Upwork.

“From Upwork we have informed the problem to our customers and the freelancers but we are not sure how the problem occurred,” said Khan, also the former country head of Upwork.

Sources said that the telecom regulator has an intention to block some unwanted site that relates with ‘rk.com’ and unfortunately they have blocked all the sites related with ‘rk’ like upwork.com, wework.com, artwork.com, network.com.

“Definitely there are some financial loses related with it, but most importantly I think this incident has created a concern for our image in the freelancing world,” said Al Amin Kabir, founder of Marketever, that also works with Upwork.

Kabir said there are huge challenges as Bangladesh cannot brand itself as the destination of freelancers because of limitations with internet, quality issues and now this type of incidents also create problems to the freelancers in the industry.

Currently there are 60,000 accounts on Upwork in the country and about 3,000 regular freelancers get work through the platform, said Kabir, a veteran of this industry.