HDFC Bank restores payment services after outage at data centre

HDFC Bank on Sunday said it had restored payment services on its digital channels after an outage at its data centre on Saturday. All through Saturday, the bank’s customers complained of being unable to carry out transactions through its ATMs, cards, net banking and Unified Payments Interface (UPI) channels. Late Saturday night, the bank tweeted that it had seen an outage at one of its data centres.

This is the third instance of a major disruption in HDFC Bank’s digital channels in as many years. On Sunday morning, the lender tweeted through one of its official handles that 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!” it said.

Emailed queries sent to the bank about the cause of the outage did not elicit a response.

The bank had seen similar service disruptions in December 2019 and December 2018. On December 5, 2019, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had said that its team had gone to identify the reasons behind HDFC Bank’s net banking and mobile app services remaining down for two consecutive days. Responding to a query on whether the RBI would come up with a framework to penalise banks for poor service, deputy governor MK Jain had said RBI was cognisant of the problem that happened on December 2, 2019. It happened as a result of technical glitches, which were resolved subsequently. “We have checked it up and it has been restored fully. Our team has gone to identify the reasons and find out what we can give them as a direction,” Jain had said.

HDFC Bank had also faced queries from analysts and investors about the cause behind the repeated outages. At that time, the lenders then head of finance and now chief executive Sashidhar Jagdishan had said the bank had become “victim[s] of its [our] own success”. “What we did not realise is with the kind of increase in businesses across liability, across assets, across payment products; and within payment products, multiple channels that we have been patronising, whether it is the cards, whether it’s the UPI volumes, I think we underestimated the growth in these volumes,” Jagdishan had said in January 2020.

He added that the bank’s transaction volumes had gone beyond the capacity it had originally envisaged. Since the second incident, the bank had derisked the parts and started to add capacities, he said. It planned to rationalise volumes too. “We’ve diverted a lot of traffic into multiple other channels and we hope to be even more comfortable over the next three to five months so that lots more capacity is being added,” Jagdishan had said.