Summary

  • Bangladesh’s July–August 2024 shutdown arrived in stages, from mobile-data restrictions to fixed-line limits and a second mobile interruption.
  • The services listed as unusable included mobile money, point-of-sale systems, e-commerce, prepaid electricity, gas and water meters, and prepaid SIM services.
  • Sumon Ahmed Sabir’s APNIC 62 slides trace failures in local apps to external DNS, cloud-hosted components, remote JavaScript and APIs, and reverse-DNS problems.

Bangladesh’s Internet shutdown did not arrive as one clean switch. Mobile data went off on 16 July 2024. A complete shutdown began on the evening of 18 July. Fixed broadband returned on 25 July for emergency services such as banks and hospitals. On 28 July, ordinary fixed access returned while social and messaging apps remained blocked. Mobile broadband came back on 31 July, stopped again on 3 August, and a further complete shutdown lasted about two hours on 5 August.

That timeline comes from a presentation by Sumon Ahmed Sabir at INNOG 9, held alongside APNIC 62. The deck frames its subject as resilience during subsea isolation. Its Bangladesh chronology records a staged shutdown of mobile and fixed services; it does not document a severed cable. That difference matters to the operators responsible for restoring service: a second path cannot repair an application that still waits for a missing resolver or a remote script.

Sabir’s slides list a startling range of casualties: mobile money, point-of-sale systems, e-commerce, prepaid electricity, gas and water meters, and prepaid SIM services. These are ordinary parts of a household’s operating day. Each one turns a network dependency into a service dependency. A payment path that disappears can strand a prepaid balance. An app that cannot fetch a remote component can fail before it reaches a local server. A device with a local address can still be unreachable when name resolution depends on a resolver outside the reachable network.

The presentation connects those failures to specific dependencies. Some local apps ran on cloud services abroad. Some loaded JavaScript or APIs from overseas cloud infrastructure. Direct-IP communication slowed when reverse DNS failed. A diagram in the deck shows local ISPs, domestic interconnection and users still linked to one another, while DNS failure left the local network unable to reach services by name. The lights on the local map stayed on; the directory had gone missing.

The detail matters because DNS often disappears from a resilience plan until the moment an application cannot find its own front door. Public resolvers outside a country can be reliable in normal conditions and unreachable in an isolation event. A local copy of an application can still fail if its page imports a script from abroad, its API checks a remote identity service, or its certificate depends on a clock that has drifted away from trusted time.

Sabir’s practical response starts with local operation. ISPs should run recursive resolvers they control and maintain local DNS infrastructure. Service owners should keep a lighter version of important apps that avoids remote scripts and APIs, with local mirrors available during an outage. For longer isolation, his slides discuss local copies of country-code zones, DNSSEC signing and local trust anchors. They also call for a reliable local time source: DNSSEC and TLS certificates stop working when clocks drift. Utility and IoT services need a separate communications path that remains available when public Internet access is disabled.

These are not competing substitutes for international connectivity. They are the local gears that keep a service useful when the international path vanishes. Cable diversity, transit routes and local exchanges address one layer. A payment terminal, a prepaid meter and an application server each have their own chain of names, code, clocks, credentials and settlement. Resilience lives across that chain.

APNIC’s account of the presentation puts the operational question plainly: what happens when international connectivity disappears while domestic infrastructure remains? Bangladesh’s answer was visible in the services people could no longer use. A local network survived on the diagram; mobile money and utility functions did not survive on the user’s screen.

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