Recently, HDFC Bank’s net banking services, UPI service and ATMs were down. Read on to know more about the bank’s online disruption…
On the evening of November 21, 2020, HDFC Bank’s net banking services, UPI service and ATMs were down. The disruptions had affected the bank’s Automated Teller Machine (ATM) network, as well as transactions on unified payments interface, credit cards and debit cards.
HDFC Bank customers on Saturday reported issues with their bank services as they faced problems while making online transactions through UPI, net banking. As per their complaints on social media platforms, people were also unable to withdraw money from ATMs.
Damage Control
In a post on microblogging site Twitter late Saturday night, the private bank informed its customers that the outage had caused disruption in the bank’s services. “We are working towards restoration of the services, which shouldn’t take long. The inconvenience is sincerely regretted,” HDFC Bank said in its post. While the issues had been resolved for some customers, others were still facing some issues, which these customers continued to complain about on social media.
Prior to the outage, the bank had informed customers about a scheduled maintenance activity which was to be undertaken between 2:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. on Sunday. It is not clear whether there was any connection between the two events.
Around noon on Sunday, the bank informed customers through Twitter that its services have been restored following the outage. “While you may face intermittent issues as the system stabilizes there is no reason to worry now! Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused,” the bank said.
Cause of Disruption
HDFC Bank attributed the problem to outage in one of its data centre. “An unexpected outage at one of our data centers has impacted some of our services. We are working towards restoration of the services, which shouldn’t take long. The inconvenience is sincerely regretted,” HDFC bank said on its official Twitter handle. However, the bank did not mention the specific reason behind the data centre outage.
Having heard about the data centre outage, let’s look into other reasons of data center outages. In general, the data centre outage is caused by complete power failure, cybercrime, human error, and unpredictable weather conditions leading to natural disasters.
RBI’s Monitoring
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has reportedly sought an explanation from private sector lender HDFC Bank after its digital services did not function from Saturday evening to early Sunday morning leading to inconvenience for its customers.
According to a report in the Economic Times, RBI has sought details behind the data centre outage that meant services on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), ATMs and card channels were unavailable for several hours.
“The regulator has sought details and the reasons behind the data centre outage. Depending on the report submitted by the bank, an internal RBI team will examine it and take further steps,” the publication quoted one of the persons as saying. “The concern especially is that three big system blackouts happened within two years despite the bank saying last time it had updated its processes and systems.”