OTP Outage Obstructs NID Operations for Eight Hours

National ID (NID) services in Bangladesh were disrupted for nearly eight hours on Tuesday due to complications with the One-Time Password (OTP) system, but operations have now resumed.

Director General of the NID wing, A.S.M. Humayun, confirmed the development on Tuesday evening. “To log into our server, a user ID and password are required, followed by a one-time password (OTP). The OTP service was down from 10:00 am to 6:30 pm, but it is now operational. Services will return to normal from tomorrow,” he said.

Due to the OTP malfunction, officials of the Election Commission (EC) were unable to input any data into the NID server throughout the day. As a result, key services such as NID corrections, address transfers, and new voter registrations were hindered. However, NID verification services remained functional.

Currently, the EC’s server holds records of approximately 125 million voters, many of whom submit daily applications for various reasons, including updates or new registrations.

The service disruption affected the processing of those applications. Nonetheless, some officials were able to continue their duties by accessing the server through facial recognition authentication in the absence of OTP.