West Bengal government portals have suffered widespread outages since at least Monday, disrupting birth and death certificate services, Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s online property-tax payments and several departmental websites. Officials cited in the report attributed the disruption to maintenance and an audit of the state’s e-governance infrastructure, while independent IT experts raised concerns about a possible malware or ransomware problem that has not been officially confirmed.
The Janma Mrityu Tathya portal, which enables citizens to download birth and death certificates, has been among the most visibly affected services. A KMC official said the civic body had been unable to work on the portal since Monday, preventing the issuance of certificates and disrupting 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 hit. The disruption has extended beyond Kolkata, according to a district magistrate quoted in the report, with services across the state affected. Websites belonging to Kolkata Police, Bidhannagar City Police, the state personnel and administrative reforms department and West Bengal Electronics Industry Development Corporation Ltd have either slowed down or malfunctioned.
A large volume of data belonging to the state finance department has also reportedly gone missing, according to officials cited by the newspaper. The report did not establish the nature or extent of the missing data. Independent IT experts who work closely with the state government flagged the possibility of malware or ransomware, but no state government official confirmed that a cyberattack had taken place.
Some IT department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the services were unavailable because of scheduled maintenance and an audit of the state’s e-governance infrastructure. They said the exercise was being conducted at the West Bengal State Data Centre in Salt Lake, which hosts government portals, consolidates e-governance applications and stores critical government data.
A state official ruled out a cyberattack and described the disruption as part of a routine infrastructure audit. The official said such exercises were based on inputs from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT-In, and would be undertaken more frequently to address the growing risk of breaches involving digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence tools.
The lack of an on-record explanation from senior officials has left the precise cause of the outage unclear. IT Minister Kalyan Chakraborti could not be reached for comment, while calls to IT department secretary Shubhanjan Das went unanswered. 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 the cyber cell, said he was not aware of the problem and would not comment.
A source quoted in the report said the affected websites were hosted at the state data centre, while portals hosted on the central government’s National Informatics Centre infrastructure continued to work. The immediate operational milestone is the completion of the data-centre maintenance and audit, after which the state’s affected citizen services are expected to be assessed and restored.
