RBI probing HDFC Bank's net banking and mobile banking app outage

The bank's customers couldn't access these services from 10 am on Monday to early Wednesday morning. Many tweeted saying they could neither access their salaries nor make recurring payments

Reserve Bank of India has said that it is probing into the two-day outage that affected HDFC Bank’s net banking and mobile banking operations. Speaking to the media, RBI deputy governor M K Jain said, “We are cognizant of that problem. It happened on December 2 and it was because of technical glitches which were restored on December 3. And, yesterday there were some media reports that customers are not able to access digital banking services of that bank. Again we checked and it has been restored fully. But our team has gone to really identify the reasons and find out what we can give them as directions.”

The largest private sector lender faced an embarrassing situation on the first two days of December, when its mobile banking and net banking app stopped working and its customer flooded micro-blogging site Twitter with posts about the stalled services. The bank’s customers had not been able to access these services from 10 am on Monday to early morning on Wednesday. Many tweeted saying that they were neither able to access their salaries nor make their recurring payments.

HDFC Bank also tweeted apologising to its customers and assuring them that the services would be restored. “We apologise that the resolution of the technical glitch is taking more time than anticipated. Our experts are working round the clock,” HDFC Bank said in a tweet.

This is not the first time that the lender’s customers have faced such an issue. A year ago, the bank had launched a new version of its mobile banking application. But its customers struggled to log in and the bank was forced to withdraw the new application and restore the old one.

HDFC Bank has 45 million customers. According to a presentation on its website, nearly 92 per cent of the transactions initiated by its customers take place on the internet and mobile services. Only four per cent of transactions are done at its branches.