SBI to find out reasons behind outage, ensure such event don't recur

Surge in digital payments in the past few years has highlighted the need for banks to raise the capacity of their digital platforms

State Bank of India, the country’s largest lender, said it is finding out the reasons behind Monday’s technical glitch in digital services. Customers took to social media to complain that they were unable to access internet banking and make digital payments.

“Some technical issue was there, and we are trying to find out what exactly was the nature of the problem,” said a senior SBI official on condition of anonymity.

In a statement issued on Monday, SBI said that digital services were impacted for a few hours due to a 'technical glitch', but that the issue has been resolved. “We regret to inform you that due to a 'technical glitch', some of our digital services were impacted for a few hours on April 03, 2023. However, the issue stands resolved, and the digital services are live and restored,” SBI had said without detailing the nature of the glitch.

The official said customers are informed well in advance when there are maintenance issues, so that inconvenience is minimised.

“We have to find out whether it was avoidable. Un-notified downtime is very seriously taken by the bank…We need to ensure there is no recurrence of such kinds of things,” the official said.

SBI will also investigate if the domain itself has narrowed down.

Typically, at the beginning of a month, there is high traffic in the mobile and internet banking solutions of banks, as customers check salaries and make payments.

The surge in digital payments during the past few years has highlighted the need for banks to increase the capacity of their digital platforms. HDFC Bank, the country’s private sector largest lender, faced a similar outage issue of its mobile and internet banking platforms some years back. This prompted the Reserve Bank of India to restrict HDFC Bank from issuing credit cards and offering new digital products under the bank’s digital 2.0 programnme in 2020. The curbs were lifted in 2021-22. HDFC Bank has transformed its technological architecture by making it more cloud native so that it can be scaled on demand.