Thirty Banks Went Dark for a Weekend, and The Switch Blamed a Server That Could Not Wait

Dhaka — For two nights, a salary ATM, a shop card machine and an interbank transfer failed together, and the failure was not in any one bank's app. It was in Q-Cash, the electronic payment network that sits behind card, ATM, point-of-sale and National Payment Switch Bangladesh transfers for about 30 lenders. The services dropped after 9pm on Sunday, 4 October, when the operator began a system migration it had told banks was not due until 28 October. They came back on Tuesday night, 6 October, after Bangladesh Bank called the operator in and told it to restore card services at once.

IT Consultants PLC, which runs Q-Cash, said in a Tuesday-night notice that the network was operating normally. Bank Asia texted customers around 12:30am that ATM, card, POS, NPSB, e-commerce and QR transactions were back. Other banks posted the same message on Facebook, SMS and their websites. Bangladesh Bank spokesperson Arief Hossain Khan said the issue had been resolved that night.

The list of institutions that had to send those messages is long enough to show this was not a niche switch. It includes Sonali, Janata, Agrani and Rupali, the state banks, and private and Islamic lenders from Bank Asia, Mercantile, Trust, Shahjalal Islami, Social Islami, ONE Bank, NCC, Jamuna, Uttara, Shimanto, Modhumoti, Meghna, Midland, Union, Community, Bengal Commercial, SBAC, NRB Commercial, NRB Global, National, First Security Islami, ICB Islamic, Bangladesh Commerce, BASIC, Krishi and Bank Alfalah. Reports put the count at 30 or 31. For customers of those banks, "digital banking" that weekend meant a queue, cash if they had it, or another bank's card.

An upgrade that moved itself forward

Senior bankers said Q-Cash gave them almost no time to warn the public. Some SMS alerts arrived hours before the work started. Others arrived after cards had already stopped. The work itself was described as still scheduled to run until noon on Saturday, 10 October. On the Monday after the outage began, several banks told customers not to expect normal service before that Saturday deadline. The deadline did not survive contact with the regulator.

On Tuesday, Bangladesh Bank summoned IT Consultants and ordered card services restored promptly. Khan's account of that meeting is the clearest public explanation so far. "We called in Q-Cash's management, and they told us it was an accident. Their server migration had been scheduled for October 28, but a server fault forced them to begin immediately. If they hadn't, a major disaster could have occurred. Even so, we have asked them for a written explanation."

That is a different story from a planned maintenance window. A planned window is announced, staffed, and given a return time. This one was pulled forward by three weeks, started on a Sunday night, and left banks quoting a Saturday recovery while the central bank was still asking what had happened. Kazi Saifuddin Munir, managing director and chief executive of IT Consultants, told The Daily Star on 5 October that the company had informed banks and the regulator of the 28 October date, then faced "unavoidable circumstances" and had no option but a full migration. He said Q-Cash had run for 24 years without an incident of this kind, and that the company was trying to have services back by Thursday evening. He did not answer later calls or WhatsApp messages from the paper.

The explanation the regulator has not accepted

A senior Bangladesh Bank official, speaking anonymously, alleged that the break came from unpaid dues to Compass Plus, the original manufacturer of the system, and from poorly planned technical work. Asked whether the outage was tied to a dispute with a foreign company, Khan said the central bank had no knowledge of that. The allegation is not a finding. It is a reason the written explanation matters. If the migration was only a failing server, the file should show the fault, the decision to move the date, and why 30 banks heard about it late. If money owed to a vendor sits in that file, the outage stops looking like an accident and starts looking like a vendor relationship that was allowed to reach a card network.

Q-Cash is not Bangladesh Bank's national switch. NPSB is the national rail for interbank transfers. Q-Cash is a private network, owned through IT Consultants, that many banks still use for cards and for the leg that connects them to NPSB. When it stops, NPSB-IBFT stops for those banks even if other banks' apps keep working. That is why a customer of a non-Q-Cash bank could pay a bill on Sunday night and a customer of Sonali or Bank Asia could not. The system looks national. The failure was a club of members.

The practical damage was ordinary and wide: withdrawals refused, shop terminals declining, internet-banking transfers hanging, QR and e-commerce payments failing for the banks on the list. No public figure has been given for the value of transactions that did not go through. Two days is long enough for salaries, market dues and medicine purchases to miss their window, and short enough that banks can call it a disruption rather than a crisis. The Saturday date still on the upgrade schedule means customers are being told the service is back while the operator is still inside the migration.

What has not been published is the written explanation Bangladesh Bank asked for, any compensation rule for failed transactions, and whether a private card switch used by the state banks needs a tested fallback before it is allowed to migrate a live system on a Sunday night. The machines are taking cards again. The question the outage left is why so many of them had only one way to say yes.