Dhaka, Oct. 28 -- Online services related to national identity cards were disrupted for around three hours on Wednesday after the Election Commission's NID server was taken offline.

The authorities said the server had been shut down for "maintenance work", although no prior announcement had been made.

Several websites in Bangladesh had already been taken offline amid fears of cyberattacks after a critical security vulnerability was detected in PHP, one of the world's most widely used programming languages for building websites.

Asked whether the NID server had encountered any similar complications, Muhammad Ashraf Hossain, system manager at the NID Wing, told bdnews24.com on Wednesday that there was "no risk" of a cyberattack on the NI...