HDFC Bank mobile app down for 1 hour; issues resolved

Earlier, HDFC Bank’s MD and CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan had apologised to customers and promised to work on the deficiencies.

The mobile banking app of the largest private sector lender HDFC Bank was down again on Tuesday. The bank later informed consumers on Twitter that issues around mobile banking app were resolved and the customers could use net banking and the app for transactions.

The bank’s IT infrastructure is under the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) audit for a series of technical problems reported earlier.

“We are experiencing some issues on the MobileBanking App. We are looking into this on priority and will update shortly. Customers are requested to please use NetBanking to complete their transaction. Regret the inconvenience caused. Thank you,” HDFC Bank tweeted at 12:26 pm on Tuesday. Around an hour later, the bank once again tweeted that the issues were resolved.

RBI is conducting a special audit on the bank’s IT infrastructure due to several glitches reported in the past. Last year in December, RBI had temporarily barred HDFC Bank from launching new digital banking initiatives and issuing new credit cards after taking a serious view of service outages at the lender over the last two years. Later, RBI had appointed an external IT firm to carry out a special audit of its digital infrastructure.

RBI governor Shaktikanta Das had earlier said the regulator had some concerns about certain deficiencies and it was necessary that HDFC Bank strengthens its IT system before expanding further. Earlier, HDFC Bank’s MD and CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan had apologised to customers and promised to work on the deficiencies.

Jagdishan admitted that bank faced two outages in November 2018 and December 2019. He also said the bank had taken help of external expertise, and had substantially implemented the inputs to strengthen IT infrastructure and systems. Unexpectedly, another incident happened on November 21, 2020, and the primary reason for the same was the power outage in the bank’s primary data centre, Jagdishan had said.