NID server down, likely to resume tomorrow

Services on the National Identity Card (NID) server of the Election Commission (EC) have been down since Tuesday morning for maintenance purpose.

The election commission says that the server is temporarily down and will resume by tomorrow, Wednesday.

Muhammad Ashraf Hossain, system manager of the NID wing at the Election Commission, informed Prothom Alo around 12:00pm today that the NID service server has been kept down for some time.

When asked about the possible time of the server being reactivated, he said that the service will be resuming from tomorrow.

Around 120 million citizens of the country have their personal information stored within the NID server. The NID server has been temporarily down several times this year. NID service was also closed on 16 August for maintenance.

Apart from that, operators in last June faced problems in using NID server for various purposes including verifying customers’ information while selling SIM cards for cell phones.

The Association of Mobile Telecom Operators of Bangladesh (AMTOB) had also sent a letter regarding the server glitch to the EC back then.

Their letter stated that there were glitches on the server for half an hour in February, for two hours in March and about 31 and a half hours in May. Even they couldn’t access the server for two days in June.