RBI Investigating Repeat Outages Of HDFC Bank’s Internet And Mobile Banking On Paydays

A team of experts constituted by the Reserve Bank of India will anlayse the reasons behind the breakdown of HDFC Bank digital banking channels which resulted in millions of customers getting locked out of their net banking and mobile banking accounts for over 48 hours earlier this week, deputy governor MK Jain said on Thursday.

“We are cognizant of the problem. It happened on 2nd of December due to technical glitches and restored on Tuesday” said the deputy governor MK Jain during the Monetary Policy press conference. He was responding to a query on whether the regulators will penalize banks such incidences.

“Our team has gone to identify the reasons (for the breakdown) and find out what we can give as directions (to the bank)“ he added

The bank attributed the problems to a technical glitch.

"We apologise that the resolution of the technical glitch is taking more time than anticipated. Our experts are working round the clock. While some customers are able to transact using NetBanking and MobileBanking app, a few may still be facing intermittent issues," tweeted the 'HDFC Bank Cares'.

Several customers, unable to access their salary accounts to make bill payments on time, expressed their ire on social media.

India's largest private bank in terms of market capitalisation, HDFC Bank has a total of 4.5 crore customers. The bank has a huge base of customers who use internet banking to carry out daily transactions.

HDFC has the highest number of salary accounts and its clientele includes 2.9 crore debit cardholders and 1.3 crore credit card customers.

This is the second such major disruption faced by the customers of the bank in recent times.

Last year around the same period, after it introduced a new version of its mobile app. the private bank’s online and movile banking application faced outage due to heavy payday traffic. The bank was eventually forcing the bank to restore an older version of their application.