Global tech outage: 10 banks, NBFCs witness minor disruptions, says RBI

Overall Indian financial sector remained insulated from the global outage

The Indian financial sector largely escaped unscathed, experiencing only minor disruptions, amid the global tech outage that severely impacted major services worldwide.

In a statement on Friday, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said 10 Indian banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) experienced minor disruptions. All of these have either been resolved or are being resolved. The outage affected IT systems globally.

The RBI, however, did not name the institutions that were impacted. 

The banking regulator said that, overall, the Indian financial sector remains insulated from the global outage.

“The Reserve Bank has made an assessment of the impact of this outage on its regulated entities. Critical systems of most banks are not in Cloud and further, only a few banks are using the CrowdStrike tool,” the RBI said in its statement. 

Additionally, RBI has issued an advisory to its regulated entities for taking necessary steps to remain alert and ensure operational resilience and continuity.

Meanwhile, two of the largest banks in India said their services were not interrupted during the outage. Several other public sector and private banks also were of this view.

“HDFC Bank confirms that its systems are unaffected by the global outage. There is no impact on banking operations,” said Ramesh Lakshminarayan, chief investment officer (CIO) & group head – IT – of the bank.

State Bank of India (SBI) chairman Dinesh Khara also said that its systems were not affected by the Microsoft outage.

“We are all fine,” Khara told PTI, when asked about the impact of the global outage.

Public sector lenders, including Canara Bank and Bank of India also indicated that their systems were not impacted since they are not using Crowdstrike.

Also, India's flagship payments platform, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), continued to operate without disruption during the global tech outage, ensuring normal processing of payments.