A technical glitch in the bKash app during peak transaction hours on Monday disrupted digital transactions across the country.
For nearly one hour, between 8:30 pm and 9:30 pm, users were unable to access the platform, turning what appeared to be a technical glitch into a nationwide disruption that affected retail commerce, telecom recharge and everyday financial transactions.
As login failures continued, commuters were unable to pay for rides, families could not send urgent funds and patients faced delays in purchasing essential medicines.
Anisur Rahman, a private service holder in the capital, tried for an hour to send money to his mother in a North Bengal village but failed as the app was inaccessible.
Later, his mother went to a nearby bKash agent point and he sent the urgent amount from another agent point in Dhaka.
The outage reignited debate over vulnerabilities in Bangladesh’s highly concentrated mobile financial services (MFS) market, as the leading operator with around 85 million users controls roughly three-fourths of the sector.
It exposed a deep operational dependency beyond a technical malfunction, leaving millions temporarily stranded in an increasingly cashless economy, Rahman said.
Telecom operators were also impacted as customers across the country failed to complete mobile recharge transactions during the outage.
Robi Axiata Chief Corporate and Regulatory Affairs Officer Shahed Alam said around 40 per cent of the company’s recharge comes through MFS, widely dominated by bKash.
“We rely on bKash for a significant portion of our online recharge activities and therefore expect a high level of system stability and resilience to ensure an uninterrupted customer experience,” Banglalink said in a statement to TIMES of Bangladesh.
Bahar Uddin, another bKash user who failed to send money on demand, expressed frustration and flagged the risk of a monopolistic MFS landscape.
“A monopolistic MFS landscape can be structurally fragile,” he said.
“Redundancy should be a top priority for a modern digital economy,” he added, noting that neither he nor his relative in the rural area uses a second MFS app.
“On 16 February evening, customer app transactions were temporarily limited due to urgent system maintenance,” said bKash Head of Corporate Communications Shamsuddin Haider Dalim.
“During that time, bKash USSD channel, online payment gateway, merchant and agent apps remained operational,” he said.
He said maintenance was completed in the shortest possible time and the customer app was restored.
He added that users attempting to log in during the maintenance period received a notification that transactions would resume shortly and the company apologised for the temporary inconvenience.
