Phone calls, offline maps: How the Bangladesh tech sector worked through an internet blackout

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

Fahim Ahmed was working late at his office in Dhaka on July 18 when he realised the internet had stopped working.

Ahmed, the CEO of Pathao – one of Bangladesh’s biggest e-commerce, ride-hailing, and food delivery startups – was instantly alarmed. It had been a tumultuous day: Thousands of protestors had taken to the streets of Dhaka opposing reservations in government jobs. There were rumors that some students had been shot by the police. The government had temporarily blocked mobile internet across the city in the evening to defuse the situation.

Ahmed called his friends and colleagues to assess what was happening and quickly realised that there was an internet blackout across Bangladesh.

“We were stunned by the government’s response to the protest,” Ahmed, whose company handles nearly half of Bangladesh’s $5 million daily digital transactions and processes up to 200,000 packages a day, told Rest of World. “No amount of business continuity planning could have fully prepared an internet-dependent mobility and logistics company for a total shutdown of mobility, internet, and social media.”

Bangladesh’s tech industry faced unprecedented challenges in July after the five-day internet blackout was followed by sociopolitical instability, culminating in the ouster of the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Sheikh Hasina.

In addition to protecting property and staff from protesting mobs, and a reputational hit from global clients, the Bangladeshi tech industry is dealing with estimated losses of at least $300 million in July, according to the E-commerce Association of Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Association of Contact Center and Outsourcing.

“It’s challenging to assess the full impact and reputational damage at this stage, which I believe will be substantial,” Russel T Ahmed, president of the Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services, told Rest of World.

Bangladesh has a thriving tech sector with 4,500 companies that employ more than 750,000 people and generate around $1.4 billion per year in export income from clients in about 80 countries. The South Asian country has one of the fastest-growing developer populations, and the world’s second-largest online freelance workforce, which does everything from software development to data entry, according to a 2017 Oxford Internet Institute study.

When Waseem Alim, chief executive of Bangladesh’s largest online grocer Chaldal, learned about the internet shutdown, the first thing he did was to halt the procurement of perishable goods. He also instructed his warehouse staff to sort products like vegetables, meat, and fish by shelf life, and start selling items that could go bad soon to local street vendors and shops.

Alim did not disclose the exact value of perishable goods in the company’s warehouse, but said it was worth “several” million takas (1 million takas are around $8,300).

“We managed to clear most of our stock due to the overall supply shortage in Dhaka,” Alim told Rest of World. “The experience has heightened our awareness. Making our warehouses self-sufficient and quickly scaling up phone orders are crucial in these situations.”

By the third day of the blackout, Chaldal’s call centre agents started reaching out to customers over the phone. The company had to tweak parts of its internal software, including the delivery app, to function offline. For instance, it enabled the map with customers’ locations to be “pre-saved in the app” and sync with its local servers so delivery workers could see the destinations even without internet.

“With our servers located in Bangladesh and a backup in our own data centers, we were able to access our customer database. Our call center team in Jashore, about 190 kilometers from Dhaka, provided crucial support,” Alim said. “We had to reduce our reliance on external services like Gmail.”

Effective internal communication helped his team get through the crisis, he told Rest of World. “We went through a period that might be unprecedented in our lifetime. Looking back on what we did, especially during the blackout, it feels like a distant, surreal memory,” Alim said.

At Pathaoi, workers were asked to work from home as much as possible on July 16 as protests simmered on the streets. Once the internet was turned off, Pathao’s team sprung into action to protect their assets, including products and cash in transit, which were moved to the company’s warehouses, Ahmed said. Pathao collects around $2 million in cash from customers each day, he said, as much of Bangladesh’s e-commerce runs on cash-on-delivery orders.

“We were working long hours and were trying to keep our operations open during the blackout … but you know disturbing scenes of students and common people getting killed in streets [with] police bullets were happening,” said Ahmed, “It was unnerving for us all.”

After halting all deliveries for the first three days of the internet shutdown, Pathao started sending its agents to deliver packages in areas that weren’t too affected by the protests. With no internet, delivery workers navigated the streets by asking locals for directions, Ahmed said. Once broadband internet was restored, Pathao requested its restaurant partners to allow the company’s delivery riders to use their Wi-Fi networks to receive orders.

Meanwhile, freelance tech workers in Bangladesh – who find work through platforms like Fiverr, Freelancer, Guru, and PeoplePerHour – spent the blackout in panic, grappling with the stress of being unable to communicate with their clients.

Aadi Roy, a Shopify web developer from Thakurgaon in northwestern Bangladesh, sat in a field near the India border, desperately hoping for a weak mobile signal. “I traveled up to 5 km each day … to find a signal,” he told Rest of World. “Sometimes, I had to sit on roads or in open fields just to connect. I felt hopeless and helpless.”

Roy later borrowed an Indian SIM card with a 1.5GB daily data allowance from a neighbour. Despite this, he lost four of his five clients due to his unavailability during the blackout.

“As the sole provider for my family of five, it was a challenging time, and my professional rating also suffered,” said Roy, who made just $400 in July instead of around $2,000 that he typically makes in a month.

Even as internet service has resumed and the country is returning to normalcy, freelance tech workers say they will have to deal with the fallout of the internet shutdown for some time. “Most of my clients are based in the US and Canada … I lost two clients, my ratings dropped, and my visibility on the marketplace plummeted,” Robi Khan, a professional graphic designer on Fiverr, told Rest of World.

The Bangladesh Freelancer Development Society, a nonprofit organisation, is working to address these issues by engaging with freelancing platforms and several clients. “We are working diligently to resolve these issues, aiming to restore and even enhance the reputation of Bangladeshi freelancers in the global market,” chairperson Tanjiba Rahman told Rest of World.

On August 8, Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus was appointed as Bangladesh’s interim prime minister.

“Dr Yunus is a highly respected figure with a strong international reputation,” Rahman said. “I believe his esteemed image could positively impact the IT sector as a whole.”

Entrepreneurs and tech industry experts hope the interim government will benefit from Yunus’ positive brand image. “Leveraging his reputation, we have the opportunity to explore the Western IT market more effectively and boost our software and information services exports,” said Ahmed.

Faisal Mahmud is a reporter covering technology based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Nayem Shaan is a photojournalist and a reporter based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.