No New Credit Cards, Digital Launches: RBI Asks HDFC Bank To Halt Services Following Outage

The Reserve Bank of India on December 2 issued an order imposing strictures on HDFC Bank, following repeated glitches in its electronic banking services.

In the order, HDFC Bank has been asked to halt all new digital business generating activities under its Digital 2.0 plan and issuance of new credit cards.

The order has also asked the bank's board to examine the lapses and fix accountability, reported Bloomberg Quint.

The banking regulator's decision comes after the country's largest private sector bank faced multiple incidents of outages in its internet banking, payment utility services, mobile banking, debit card transactions, UPI and other modes of payment over the last two years.

Earlier, on November 23, the central bank had sought an explanation from HDFC after its digital services were disrupted for over 13 hours, from the evening of November 21 till November 22 morning.

"The above measures shall be considered for lifting (the restrictions) upon satisfactory compliance with the major critical observations as identified by the RBI," the statement further read.

HDFC has faced multiple technical glitches:

On November 21, many customers complained that they could not access their digital banking services. The bank said its services had faced technical issues because of the unexpected power outage at one of the data centres.

Another incident was reported on a year ago, on December 3, when customers complained that they were unable to pay their loan EMIs or credit card bills on time. When contacted, the bank then told Moneycontrol that 'a technical bug' had resulted in the delay. The bank said it took cognisance of the issue and assured to resolve it shortly. It also dismissed all the rumours of any possible cyber attack. Later it was found that the outage happened because the bank had 'underestimated' the growth in payment volumes and the disruption was more of a capacity issue, the media reported.

HDFC in response, has reassured its customers that such technical bugs will have no impact on the existing operations. The bank, in its official statement, has claimed that it has taken various measures to protect its IT systems over the last two years.

"The Bank has always endeavoured to provide seamless digital banking services to its customers and has been taking conscious, concrete steps to remedy the recent outages on its digital banking channels," it added.

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