Between Saturday evening and Sunday noon, HDFC Bank customers faced technical issues due to a power outage at one of the bank’s data centres. Several complaints began to appear on social media as customers could not complete digital payments transactions, access ATMs, or use their credit or debit cards as well as internet and mobile banking platforms. In a tweet on Saturday night, the bank said, “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.”
At around midnight on Saturday, the bank informed its customers that it would undertake a scheduled maintenance activity between 2:30 am and 5:30 am on November 22 and that the internet banking and mobile banking app would be unavailable. By around noon on Sunday, the bank said that its services had 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,” the bank tweeted.
MediaNama has emailed queries to the bank. We will update this post if responses are received.
“There was a power outage at the bank’s data centre at the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge CITY in Navi Mumbai on Saturday. But by midnight Saturday, the banks’ systems were back online and from thereon all transactions were being monitoring through the night,” a person aware of the development told MediaNama on the condition of anonymity.
This is not the first time the bank has faced technical issues leading to their digital platforms going offline. Two years ago, when the bank was launching its new mobile banking app, there was an issue with its roll-out, which forced the bank to pull it back and restore an older version. In December 2019, there was a “technical glitch” that led to the banks’ customers unable to log-in to the internet banking platform and mobile banking app. “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,” the bank had tweeted at the time.
As the country’s second largest bank, HDFC Bank’s network is expansive with over 56 million customers, nearly ₹11.5 lakh crore in deposits, 14.5 million credit cards, around 2 million merchant payment points and nearly 15,000 ATMs, according to its 2019-20 annual report. Around 95.1% of all retail transactions of the bank take place digitally. Further, in a recent press release, the bank said that it processes 48% of the overall card transactions at merchant level in terms of volumes and about a fourth through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI).
