Telecommunications were widely disrupted in Bangladesh on Friday amid violent student protests against government job quotas, which have killed nearly two dozen people this week. According to the French news agency AFP, the death toll from Thursday’s violence has risen to 32. Reuters reported that 13 people had been killed, adding to the six killed earlier in the week, but could not immediately confirm the higher figure.
Authorities cut some mobile services on Thursday to quell the unrest. Still, the disruption spread throughout the country on Friday morning, according to Reuters witnesses in Dhaka and New Delhi.
Phone calls from abroad were mostly disconnected, and internet calls could not be completed. On Friday morning, several Bangladesh-based newspapers’ websites were not updated, and their social media accounts were inactive.
On Friday morning, only some voice calls were working in the country, with no mobile data or broadband available, according to a Reuters photographer in Dhaka. He explained that SMSes, or mobile-to-mobile text messages, were also not being delivered.
The nationwide protests, the largest since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s re-election earlier this year, have been fueled by high youth unemployment. Nearly one-fifth of the country’s 170 million people are unemployed or out of school.
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