NEW DELHI: Telecommunications were widely disrupted in Bangladesh on Friday (Jul 19) amid violent student protests against quotas for government jobs in which nearly two dozen people have been killed this week.
French news agency AFP reported that the death toll in Thursday’s violence had risen to 32. Reuters had reported that 13 people were killed, adding to six dead earlier in the week, and could not immediately verify the higher number.
Authorities had cut some mobile services on Thursday to try to quell the unrest but the disruption spread across the country on Friday morning, Reuters witnesses in Dhaka and New Delhi said.
Telephone calls from overseas were mostly not getting connected and calls through the internet could not be completed.
Web sites of several Bangladesh-based newspapers were not updating on Friday morning and their social media handles were also not active.
Only some voice calls were working in the country and there was no mobile data or broadband on Friday morning, a Reuters photographer in Dhaka said. Even SMSes or mobile-to-mobile text messages were not going through, he added.
