RBI seeks explanation on frequent disruptions after HDFC Bank's e-services face 12-hour outage

After disruption of digital services for hours from Saturday evening till Sunday morning, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has sought an explanation from HDFC Bank. The unexplained outage in HDFC data centres led to the total disruption in UPI, ATM and card channels of the bank for over 12 hours. HDFC Bank customers have faced this kind of digital disruption for the third time in two years.

The banking regulator has sought details about the data centre where the outage happened, following which it'll examine the matter and take further steps, The Economic Times reported. The RBI is reportedly concerned over repeated -- 3 system blackouts in two years -- incidents of technical glitches at the bank. Meanwhile, the HDFC Bank tweeted yesterday the services have been restored but customers could still face the problem.

Also read: HDFC Bank digital services restored after hours of outage

"The services impacted following the outage have been restored. While you may face intermittent issues as the system stabilises there is no reason to worry now! Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused. Thank you for bearing with us during this period," a tweet by India's largest private sector lender said.

On Saturday, customers took to Twitter to complain about the unavailability of transactional services, prompting an announcement by the bank. "An unexpected outage at one of our data centres has impacted some of our services. We are working towards the restoration of the services, which shouldn't take long. The inconvenience is sincerely regretted," HDFC tweeted on Saturday.

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Along with the rudimentary online services, customers also complained that linked accounts on applications like Zomato, Google Pay, and Paytm were disabled. Some people also complained about the bank website and HDFC app on Twitter, while many were not able to receive One Time passwords (OTP)s.

Earlier in December 2019, the HDFC customers had complained that they were unable to pay their loan EMIs and clear their bills on time. This issue lasted from December 2, 2020, to December 5, 2020. This issue prompted the RBI governor to intervene and deploy a team of experts to investigate the reasons behind the 3-day-outage. According to Mint, the December 2019 outage was not due to a cyberattack, but because the lender had underestimated growth in payment volumes. The Bank had faced a similar technical glitch with its application, after launching a new version of the mobile banking app in 2018.

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