Customers of private sector lender HDFC Bank Ltd. faced problems with digital transactions on Saturday, after the bank saw one of its data centres face an unexpected outage.
The disruptions had affected the bank's automated teller machine network, as well as transactions on unified payments interface, credit cards and debit cards.
#HDFC Bank down for the past one hour. No services for net banking and atm @HDFC_Bank
.@HDFC_Bank @HDFCBank_Cares entire payments stack is down. Cards, Internet banking, UPI, IMPS. No communication to customers.
In a post on microblooging 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.
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.
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. According to a person with direct knowledge of the development, a power outage at the bank's data centre in Navi Mumbai had caused the problems.
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.
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.This is not the first time that the bank's customers have seen their services suspended owing to technical problems. In December 2019, the bank's services had faced disruptions for over two days. A year before that, the bank had launched a renewed version of its mobile banking application, but its customers struggled to login. That forced the bank to pull back the new application and restore the old version.
As India's largest private bank, a large portion of the transactions it process flow through HDFC Bank's digital channel. According to the bank's annual report for the year ended March 31, 2020, about 95.1% transactions it recorded were through digital channels.
The latest annual report also noted that the bank had created a digital transaction monitoring committee to promote such services. The committee, headed by Srikanth Nadhamuni, is also in charge of reviewing customer services on the digital banking framework for the lender.
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