The days were pure chaos. Protests were erupting everywhere, and as the digital chief reporter, I had no choice but to keep my eyes glued to my computer screen or my cellphone, constantly scanning social media for updates. The country seemed to be on the edge. People had been facing internet issues since July 14, but nothing had been officially shut down yet. We were getting reports from different areas about people struggling with connectivity, but the government hadn't acted yet.

I arrived at the office early on July 16, knowing the situation was worsening by the minute. The violence was escalating—people were being killed in the streets, and police had started opening fire on the protesters. The newsroom was a whirlwind. The tension was palpable. Everyone was on edge, trying to make sense of what was happening and where the country was headed. My editor, the chief news editor, and all the senior newsroom leaders kept reminding us to be extra cautious. The last thing we needed was to rush a story without verifying it properly, especially in a situation as volatile and dangerous as this.

We had a strict rule: nothing goes live without being verified at least three times. The pressure was intense, but I understood how critical it was to get things right. Around 2:50pm, a social media post went viral, claiming that a protester had been killed in Rangpur. The protester was reportedly a student at Rangpur Begum Rokeya University. We had a correspondent in Dinajpur, who covers the Rangpur district, so I called him. He said he was trying to confirm the news but hadn't yet been able to. I didn't want to wait, so I called one of the university's teachers. He said he had heard about the incident and was on his way to Rangpur Medical College Hospital to identify the body. Then, one of our digital reporters managed to get a brief quote from the police in Rangpur, but they weren't providing much detail. We uploaded a short story with what little we had, knowing it was just the beginning.

Soon after, the protest took on a life of its own. A powerful image of Sayeed, the student who had been killed, went viral on social media. People began changing their profile pictures to his photo in tribute. Then, news broke that the BNP office had been raided, and more casualties were reported in Dhaka. It was a blur of breaking news, and we were in the office until 3:00am, constantly updating and adjusting our coverage as new developments came in.

The next morning, as I was getting settled in, a colleague came over with some worrying news. He'd heard rumours that the government was planning to shut down internet services, particularly because the protesters were using social media to communicate and share updates. Social media posts were spreading like wildfire whenever there was a casualty or a shooting. At first, I didn't take it seriously, thinking it was just another rumour circulating amid the chaos. But I couldn't ignore it either, so I made some calls to check.

To my surprise, I got confirmation from a top intelligence source that the government was indeed planning an internet shutdown. The reality of it hit me hard, and I knew things were about to get even more difficult.

In response, the chief news editor, deputy editor, and the leaders of the digital operations team held an emergency meeting. We needed a work plan during the possible internet blackout, especially for collecting information from our district correspondents. How would we continue to report the news? How would we upload stories?

We quickly devised a plan. We decided to continue writing stories and archiving them, even if we couldn't publish them online. The idea was to create a record of everything we were reporting in case we couldn't get it out to the public. We couldn't predict how long the shutdown would last, but we had to be ready for anything. We also instructed our reporters, both in the districts and at the central office, to send video footage and photos via FTP. If we couldn't upload stories to our digital platforms, we'd rely on social media to keep the public updated.

By the night of July 17, the government, led by the Awami League alliance, shut down mobile internet services. Despite that, our news operation kept going as usual, though we struggled to get updates from our district reporters. They sent stories through FTP, but uploading them to our digital platforms became a challenge. Even so, we managed to keep the newsroom running, gathering as much as we could.

On the night of July 18, broadband internet was also cut off. It was a surreal moment. We were completely disconnected from the world, unable to publish anything, unable to verify reports in real time. The blackout made it even harder to get updates from international sources. To work around this, one of our colleagues went to the AFP and other local and international agency offices with a USB drive to collect the latest reports. But when he arrived, AFP wouldn't allow any USB drives on their computers. So, another colleague sat at the agency's computers, scrolling through their news feeds and copying the stories we needed. Those stories were then brought back to the office, typed up, and prepared for print.

As our newsroom was fully automated and heavily reliant on the internet, a new challenge came up: how to send the news pages to the printing press to produce the newspaper.

Meanwhile, people started calling the newsroom asking for updates. They were desperate for news, but there was little we could do. A discussion began in the newsroom about whether we could upload stories from abroad, using international connections to get stories out. But we quickly abandoned that idea. The risk of something going wrong was too great, and we couldn't afford to make a mistake during such a critical time. So, we decided to hold off on uploading anything digitally and simply wait it out.

It was like we had been hurled into an eclipse that left us completely in the dark for five days. The world was out there. And yet we did not what was going on, just as the world could not find out what was happening here on the ground. Broadband internet resumed on July 23, but mobile internet wasn't back online for another five days. Even then, many of the popular platforms -- Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube --remained blocked for three more days.

Those were strange, suffocating times. We could not relent. As reporters, we had to keep at it even though we were systematically being stripped of our tools. The internet shutdown added another dimension to the already surreal situation we were in. We had suddenly been slowed to, it seemed, a snail's pace simply because the internet was not there. But we kept working. We kept writing. We still tried to tell the truth -- one small story at a time.