RBI questions HDFC Bank on frequent disruption in online banking services

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has sought an explanation from HDFC Bank after its digital services were disrupted from the evening of November 21 till November 22 morning. The outage in HDFC data centres led to the total disruption in UPI, ATM and card services of the private lender for over 12 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 Economic Times reported, citing sources.

“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," the source added.

The bank said that an unexpected outage at one of its data centres led to the transaction failures and the services have been restored.

"Dear Customers, 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," HDFC said in a tweet.

Dear Customers,

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. — HDFC Bank Cares (@HDFCBank_Cares) November 22, 2020

A similar incident had taken place in December 2019, with customers complaining that they were unable to pay their loan EMIs or settle credit card bills on time.

Following this, RBI deputy governor MK Jain had said the regulator had taken into account the outage and deployed a team of experts to investigate the matter.

It was later found that the outage took place because the lender "underestimated" growth in payment volumes and the disruption was more of a capacity issue.