A West Bengal state portal outage has disrupted access to birth and death certificates, online property-tax payments and several departmental services since at least Monday, affecting citizens and government offices across the state, according to a report by the Times of India – Kolkata.
The Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, which enables citizens to download birth and death certificates, has been inaccessible or unreliable. A Kolkata Municipal Corporation official told the newspaper that staff had been unable to work on the portal since Monday, preventing the issue of certificates and the uploading of digital records. Some users reportedly managed to download certificates, but most were unable to do so.
KMC officials also said online property-tax payments had been affected. Other services reported as disrupted include key functions on the labour department’s website and portals operated by Kolkata Police, Bidhannagar City Police, the state personnel and administrative reforms department and West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation Ltd, or Webel. The affected websites were described as either slow or malfunctioning.
The disruption extends beyond Kolkata, a district magistrate told the Times of India – Kolkata. A source said the affected portals were hosted at the West Bengal State Data Centre in Moni Bhandar, Salt Lake. The facility hosts state government websites, consolidates e-governance applications and stores critical government data.
The cause of the outage has not been officially confirmed on record. Some IT department officials, speaking anonymously, attributed the interruption to scheduled maintenance and an audit of the state’s e-governance infrastructure. Another state official ruled out a cyberattack and said the disruption was linked to a routine infrastructure audit.
The official said such audits are based on inputs from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-In, and would be conducted more frequently because of the growing risk of breaches involving artificial-intelligence tools. The report did not provide a technical assessment or public incident notice confirming the nature of the outage.
Independent IT experts who work closely with the state government raised concerns about a possible malware or ransomware incident. That possibility remains unconfirmed. No state government official spoke on record to confirm a cyberattack, data loss or ransomware infection.
Officials told the newspaper that a large volume of data belonging to the state finance department had gone missing, although the report did not specify the nature, extent or cause of the reported loss. The IT minister, Kalyan Chakraborti, could not be reached for comment. Calls to IT department secretary Shubhanjan Das went unanswered, while Nitu Shukla, special secretary in the IT department and a senior Webel official, said she was not authorised to speak.
Ashok Prasad, additional director general of police in charge of the cyber cell, said he was not aware of the problem and would not comment. A source said websites hosted on the central government’s National Informatics Centre infrastructure were functioning normally, indicating that the reported disruption was concentrated around systems hosted by the state data centre.
The immediate operational impact is on services that citizens and government offices use for legal records, municipal payments and departmental administration. The state government’s next public clarification, along with restoration of the affected portals and confirmation of the data centre audit’s findings, will determine whether the disruption was a maintenance-related outage or involved a security incident.
