A huge fire broke out in Khwaja Tower, a 14-storied commercial complex located in the Mohakhali area of Bangladesh’s capital city of Dhaka on the evening of October 26. Local media reported three people dead and at least 10 injured in the incident, that also left telecom, internet and data center services disrupted for hours. Services are now slowly limping back to normalcy.
Disruption of internet and telecom services
Khwaja Tower is a commercial building, and houses offices of major Internet Service Providers (ISPs), a huge telecommunications company, as well as two data centers that were connected to International Internet Gateways (IIGs) and Interconnection Exchanges (ICXs).
Earth Telecom and one of its ventures Race Online also have offices on the eighth and ninth floors of the building. NRB Telecom, a company that provides services to mobile phone operators, had a data centre that was rented and run by Windstream Communications. The fire thus effectively left telecom and internet communication paralysed in the region for several hours.
W.Media spoke to Masud Parvaj, CEO of DCiCON. He said, “This is a setback for Bangladesh’s aspiration to become a digital economy. Bangladesh needs purpose-built data centers and operators to ensure quality digital infrastructure and high safety standards. Due to lack of government regulations on building data center standards, existing data centers should not be housed in a building designed for commercial purposes.”
Services of Grameenphone, which is one of the largest mobile phone service providers, and has a significant chunk of its customers located in far-flung and remote rural parts of Bangladesh, were also impacted. In an official statement, Grameenphone told its customers (translated from Bengali), “Due to a fire in Amtali, Mahakhali, there will be a temporary difficulty in voice calls from Grameenphone to other operators. Our team is trying to fix the problem and we apologise for the inconvenience.” Services of ADN Telecom, Banglalink and Robi were also impacted.
TechAByte Solutions also tried to allay its customers fears. Taking to X (former;y Twitter) on October 26, the company posted, “(A) Fire broke out at Our Dhaka Data Center at 5 PM Today. We request our clients to be patient and stand by us during this time. We are actively addressing the situation and working diligently to resolve issues.”
Notice:
Fire broke out at Our Dhaka Data Center at 5 PM Today. We request our clients to be patient and stand by us during this time. We are actively addressing the situation and working diligently to resolve issues.
𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐮𝐬:https://t.co/W8RMtJojNU pic.twitter.com/YLfxixysa4— TechAByte Solutions (@TechaByteXYZ) October 26, 2023
At the time of publishing this story, three of its systems were still down.
Emdadul Hoque, president of the ISPs Association of Bangladesh, was quoted by local media as saying that the two data centres at Khawaja Tower were connected to 10-12 IIGs that serve several hundred ISPs. He estimated that 40-50 percent of ISPs of the country had been directly affected by the fire, while the rest faced partial disruption of services.
How the shocking events unfolded
The fire broke out on the 13th floor of the building sometime before 5 P.M local time on October 26, 2023. As per a statement issued by Fire Service and Civil Defence Media Wing Officer Shahjahan Shikder, the local fire brigade was informed at 4:58 PM and they reached the spot by 5:07 PM.
Videos posted by local news outlets showed fire raging and smoke billowing out of the 12th and 13th floors of the building. Many people who were trapped inside the building could be seen trying to break windows in a desperate bid to escape the fire. Videos also showed some people had made their way to the roof of the building, and were trying to use cables and ropes to climb down to the roof of an adjacent building to escape the fire.
Nearly a dozen fire trucks battled the flames for hours before the fire could be brought even partially under control around 7:30 PM local time. Personnel from Bangladesh’s defence forces also joined rescue operations. But by then it was too late for three people. While police identified one of the deceased as a data center worker, the other two were identified as employees of a major ISP.
Services only appear to have been restored partially. W.Media will update this story when more information becomes available.
