The Card Network Outage Bangladesh Bank Called a Coincidence Was Actually a Vendor Sabotage Fight

A Week Without Cards

For a stretch of customers at roughly 30 Bangladeshi banks, the first week of October turned into an exercise in frustration. ATMs refused cards, point of sale machines at shops sat dark, cash recycling machines stopped dispensing, and QR payments and online transfers through the shared Q-Cash network simply would not go through. The disruption began around 9 PM on Sunday, October 4, and for some banks it dragged on for nearly a week, with full restoration of Q-Cash services only confirmed late on Tuesday, October 6. Customers described missed medical payments, failed emergency cash withdrawals, and purchases abandoned at the till, all while receiving what they said was little or no advance warning.

Banks named in connection with the outage included Bank Asia, Bangladesh Krishi Bank, Janata Bank, Bengal Commercial Bank, Community Bank, Jamuna Bank, Midland Bank, Meghna Bank, Mercantile Bank, Modhumoti Bank, National Bank, NRBC Bank, NCC Bank, Rupali Bank, Shahjalal Islami Bank, Shimanto Bank, Social Islami Bank, Trust Bank, and Uttara Bank, among others. Bangladesh Bank said transactions routed directly through the National Payment Switch Bangladesh, along with mobile financial service providers like bKash, were unaffected, and that core settlement systems including BACPS, BEFTN, and RTGS kept running normally throughout.

Bangladesh Bank's First Explanation

When the outage first made headlines, the official line was almost soothing in its ordinariness. Bangladesh Bank's Executive Director and spokesperson, Arief Hossain Khan, described the simultaneous shutdown as a coincidence, telling reporters that individual banks had simply scheduled their annual maintenance for the same period after receiving the necessary regulatory clearance. A central bank press release, signed by Assistant Spokesperson Sayeda Khanam, attributed the disruption to urgent technical upgrades and system migration work being carried out by Information Technology Consultants PLC, the firm that operates the Q-Cash switch, and called it a routine, system wide migration and maintenance exercise. Customers were told to watch their bank's SMS alerts, app, or branch notices, use alternative accounts or mobile financial services for urgent payments, and be alert to fraud risks while the network was down.

That explanation held for about two days. It also did little to calm customers who said they had received no meaningful warning that a maintenance window could knock out card services, in some cases, for almost a week. Several banks said they had posted notices through SMS, social media, and their websites, but customers argued none of that amounted to a clear heads up for an outage of this length and scale.

The Real Story Emerges

On October 7, a very different account surfaced. According to Information Technology Consultants PLC, known as ITCL, the outage had nothing to do with routine, pre planned maintenance. The company said the real trigger was a bitter falling out with Compass Plus, the Russian technology firm whose software has long underpinned the Q-Cash switch, which Bangladesh Bank had previously enlisted to help modernise the network's e-commerce payment capability. ITCL's managing director and chief executive, Kazi Saifuddin Munir, said the company had decided back in August to phase out Compass Plus's platform over a 12 to 18 month transition and move instead to Way4, an enterprise payment platform built by the Brussels based firm OpenWay. Compass Plus, ITCL alleged, did not take the decision well. The firm is accused of threatening to withdraw technical support, demanding a 1.5 million dollar migration fee, and insisting on an advance payment guarantee backed by Bangladesh Bank itself before agreeing to cooperate with the handover.

The dispute, ITCL claims, escalated into sabotage. The company alleges that after it pressed ahead with the planned migration, Compass Plus injected a malicious script into ITCL's servers that forced them to restart every eight hours, wiping routing tables each time and halting data processing across the entire network. It is a serious and so far one sided allegation. No outlet reporting on the episode has published a response from Compass Plus itself, and Bangladesh Bank's own statements have stopped short of endorsing ITCL's version of events, so the sabotage claim should be read for now as ITCL's account of what happened rather than an established fact. What is not in dispute is that whatever triggered the repeated server restarts, the practical effect was identical to what customers experienced: card and ATM services across dozens of banks going dark, repeatedly, over several days.

Bangladesh Bank's posture shifted once the vendor dispute came to light. Munir said ITCL alerted its partner banks, including bKash, as soon as the problem was identified. Bangladesh Bank, for its part, summoned ITCL's management on Tuesday and directed the company to restore all card related services, including network switching, as quickly as possible. Arief Hossain Khan, the same spokesperson who had earlier called the outage a coincidence, struck a notably sharper tone once the fuller picture emerged, telling reporters that the underlying issue was technical, but that the failure to manage it promptly had caused severe suffering for cardholders. Central bank officials were said to be unhappy that ITCL had shut the system down without prior notice, a decision that contradicts Bangladesh Bank's own guidelines requiring advance public notice ahead of scheduled maintenance. The regulator has indicated it will issue show cause notices to member banks over the abrupt suspension of services.

A Dispute With No Clean Ending Yet

The timing of the migration is itself a point of friction. ITCL's move away from Compass Plus was reportedly scheduled to complete by late October, well after the week when services actually broke down, which raises the question of whether the public disruption was an unplanned early casualty of a dispute still playing out behind the scenes, or something closer to a deliberate pressure tactic by one side against the other. Bangladesh's digital payment rails have had a rough few months by any measure, this same Q-Cash infrastructure has been blamed for synchronized outages before, even as the central bank has pushed hard on initiatives like free, instant Bangla QR payments to deepen digital adoption. A dispute of this kind, playing out on infrastructure that underpins the daily financial lives of millions of cardholders, is a reminder that modernising payment rails carries real operational risk when the underlying technology relationships turn adversarial.

For now, Bangladesh Bank says Q-Cash services have been restored, though the full picture of how individual banks' own, separately scheduled maintenance work interacts with the vendor dispute remains murky. What is clear is that the explanation customers were initially given, a tidy coincidence of routine upgrades, was not the whole story, and that the regulator itself appears to have been working with incomplete information when it first addressed the public. Whether the show cause notices lead to any accountability, either for ITCL's handling of the shutdown or for the banks that customers say gave them too little warning, will be the next thing worth watching from a dispute that briefly took a meaningful slice of the country's card payments offline.