By around 9am last Thursday, long queues had already formed outside the Land Reform and Land Revenue Office in Bhaktapur. People clutched land ownership certificates, citizenship cards and bank documents, hoping to complete their work and return home quickly.

The urgency was theirs alone. Inside the office, services had barely moved.

As the hours passed, frustrated visitors repeatedly approached the service counter with the same question: “Why isn’t anything happening?”

The answer never changed.

“The system isn’t working.”

Many stayed, hoping the system would come back online. It never did.

Ramesh Parajuli (name changed), a resident of Madhyapur Thimi, was trying to complete the purchase of a small plot of land. After being turned away on Wednesday because the system had failed, he returned at 9am the following morning.

The crowd kept growing throughout the day, but services never resumed.

“I stayed until the office closed. The courtyard was packed with people waiting for service. Even when the server briefly came online for about two hours, nothing got done,” he said. “Staff eventually told everyone to come back on Monday because there would be no work on Friday due to technical issues.”

He claimed that while the public was told the system was down, work appeared to be continuing inside the office.

The disruption was not limited to Bhaktapur.

Advocate Sharmila Parajuli spent four consecutive days visiting the Land Reform and Land Revenue Office in Bagbazar, Kathmandu, to update a client’s land records.

Each day, officials gave her a different reason for turning her away: there were too many people, there was a power outage, or the server was down.

“I spent four straight days coming here and still couldn’t get the work done. My time has been wasted, and I still don’t know when it will be completed,” she said. “How can the government claim it is building a Digital Nepal when the internet doesn’t work, servers keep failing, power cuts interrupt services, and even a simple task takes four days?”

As Nepal’s fiscal year drew to a close, repeated failures in the government’s digital land system disrupted services at land revenue offices across the country.

The Department of Land Management and Archives acknowledged the problem in a public notice issued last Thursday, saying technical issues had affected the ‘public access module’.

According to the department, the outage affected the online request system used by paralegal assistants and banks, disrupting services including land registration, transfer of ownership, mortgage registration and mortgage release.

Harisharan Thapa, a computer officer at the department, said the problem lay not with the internal government system but with the public-facing platform used by service seekers.

“The heavy end of the fiscal year workload is believed to have caused the problem,” he said. “A system never has just one issue. When one problem is fixed, another appears. We have to keep improving and monitoring it because technical problems are unavoidable.”

Nepal has spent years promoting its Digital Nepal agenda, introducing online application forms, electronic records, digital cadastral maps, e-services and electronic land lien systems.

The goal was to reduce bureaucratic hurdles, improve transparency, eliminate middlemen, and reduce the need for repeated visits to government offices.

Instead, citizens often find themselves making even more visits when the systems fail.

Land revenue offices, the Department of Transport Management, the Department of National ID and Civil Registration, and local governments have all experienced recurring digital outages that regularly disrupt public services.

Outages at the Department of National ID and Civil Registration have become particularly common.

Users frequently complain that online forms fail to open, one-time passwords (OTPs) never arrive, applications cannot be submitted, or servers stop working when they reach government offices.

Tripti Guragain experienced exactly that last Thursday while applying for a national identity card on behalf of her 55-year-old mother.

Although she completed the online application, the OTP needed to verify it never arrived. Repeated phone calls to the department went unanswered.

“They say everything is online, but neither the application process nor the support works,” she said. “At this point, carrying paper files to the office would be easier.”

Nirajan Shrestha, the department’s information officer, acknowledged the growing software problems.

“The system works one moment, slows down the next, and can stop working altogether,” he said. “Even after improvements, it performs well only for a while before problems resurface.”

He attributed the failures partly to the growing number of users exceeding the software’s practical capacity.

Citizens have also reported similar frustrations at local government offices.

At the Kageshwari Manohara Municipality, residents say recurring system failures force them to make repeated trips for even routine services.

Nirmala Karki of Kadaghari recently posted a video on TikTok expressing her frustration after waiting more than 48 hours for a routine municipal document.

In the video, she questioned whether officials intended to do anything beyond simply saying “the system isn’t working.”

Speaking to Kantipur, Karki said she had visited the municipality to obtain a house rent recommendation letter but had to return repeatedly because the system remained offline.

“I had to visit for four days just for one document,” she said. “The first day, the system was down. The second and third days were the same. I became so frustrated after waiting for hours that I posted the video.”

She said municipal staff themselves could not tell people when the system would be restored.

Purushottam Subedi, the municipality’s chief administrative officer, said the problems stemmed from the surge in demand at the end of the fiscal year.

“The system failure created serious difficulties,” he said. “We stayed in the office until midnight trying to finish the work, but we simply couldn’t.”

The municipality relies on the Sub-National Treasury Regulatory Application (SUTRA) system for financial management, which the Financial Comptroller General Office operates

Because the software is centrally managed, local governments cannot modify or repair it themselves, Subedi said.

“People who come here blame the municipality, but the system is controlled elsewhere,” he said. “Unless the government upgrades server capacity, these disruptions will continue to occur.”