HDFC Bank digital services restored after hours of outage

HDFC Bank on Sunday announced the restoration of its digital payments services, after hours of outage on Saturday had impacted the smooth functioning of the services. Along with online card payments and UPI transactions, some consumers also faced problems with the ATM machines.

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

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 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 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.

While the cause for the compromised data centres has not been stated, the said outage is said to have lasted for more than 12 hours. According to the trends by Down Detector, complaints started coming in at 6 PM, and peaked about 8 PM.

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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