Tag: HDFC Bank outage

HDFC Bank CEO outlines ‘Technology Transformation’ plan to fix digital glitches, BFSI News, ET BFSI

Banking & Finance

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HDFC, which has been hit by several digital glitches since the past year, has embarked on a scale changing technology adoption and transformation agenda to help drive its ambitious future growth plans.

“Our aim is to “Keep Systems ALWAYS ON. ALWAYS SECURE. AND PERFORM at SCALE”. While we execute this Technology Transformation agenda, there will sometimes be pain and outages beyond our control. We must doubly resolve to reach out proactively to our customers / stakeholders and explain the path that we are traversing to make their experience with us smoother, faster and better,” HDFC Bank CEO Sashi Jagdishan wrote in a letter to staff.

Some of the specific initiatives the bank has embarked under Technology Transformation Agenda, according to Jagdishan, include:

1. Infrastructure scalability: We have invested heavily in the scale up of our infrastructure to handle any potential load that we will encounter for the next 3/5 years. We are also in the process of accelerating our cloud strategy to be on the cutting edge leveraging best in class cloud service providers.

2. Disaster Recovery (DR) resiliency:

a. We have strengthened our process of monitoring our Data Centre (DC) and have shifted key applications to new DC.

b. DR switch over for Disaster recovery resiliency has been completed for key customer facing applications including automating DR switch over for key applications.

c. Enhanced monitoring capabilities have been put in place to manage our Data centre operations and Resiliency processes.

3. Security Enhancements: We have strengthened our firewalls further. We have to be scanning the horizon for potential security issues and be ever prepared to face them. We haven’t had any security issues in the past. But this is always an important area of focus and action plans are underway for further robustness.

4. Monitoring mechanisms. An enhanced application monitoring mechanism has been put in place across the board to enable us to keep our IT systems Always On.
Reasons for glitches

On technical issues, Jagdishan gave an elaborate reasoning for failures:

November 2018: Crash of the New Mobile Banking App.

Reason: We faced an unprecedented demand to download the new mobile app. We have learnt and since refined our processes of managing the mobile banking app and has never faced any such challenges later. After the Nov 2018 initial launch, we have upgraded our mobile app seven times over the last two years and in all these instances it has been a smooth affair with no downtime or customer inconvenience whatsoever.

December 2019: Outage with Mobile Banking App

Reason: All banking systems are complicated and interconnected and each component has to work efficiently for us to deliver our promise to our customers. In this instance, one of the vendors system upgrade patch issue was faulty and the same has been addressed adequately. We have and will continue to reinforce vendor patch application.

November 2020: Outage at Data centre

Reason: A third party human error lead to the downtime. To remove this risk completely, we have taken several actions to mitigate such instances in future.

March 1, 2021: Net Banking/Mobile Banking downtime

Reason: The issue here occurred on account a faulty signature on our HIPS (Host Intrusion prevention software). This was an issue acknowledged by the manufacturer which impacted several global clients as well. The faulty signature resulted in slowing down response on Net banking and mobile banking. This has, since, been rectified.

March 31, 2021: Net Banking/Mobile Banking downtime

Reason: The issue occurred on account of a hardware component failure in one of our database servers resulting in a slow response to some of our customers. A large number of our customers were able to carry out their NB/MB activities in this period and we saw only a marginal dip in the number of transactions that day.

“To put things in perspective, in the last 28 months, we have had 5 instances of downtime. Every instance has hardened our resolve to do better keeping our customers in mind,” Jagdishan said.

Advice to staff
Business objectives should be driven keeping in mind the 3Cs that I wrote about in my last communication to you. It is Culture, Conscience and Customers. Continue to keep the humility quotient (HQ) high and make it part of your DNA. I have committed myself to be part of the on-going cultural transformation and I urge each one of you to inculcate and espouse the same mantra down the line. The broad macro opportunities continue to present themselves across the retail, MSME and Corporate Banking for a Bank like us and across geographies’ like semi-urban and rural markets, he said.



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HDFC Bank netbanking outage attracts customer outrage, BFSI News, ET BFSI

Banking & Finance

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Private lender HDFC Bank’s netbanking and mobile banking platforms suffered an outage on Tuesday, leading to customers of the bank complaining on various social media platforms. The outage comes amidst the lender being under scrutiny of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for repeated digital outages, for which the regulator had barred HDFC Bank from the issuance of new credit cards as well as digital business activities.

HDFC Bank in a tweet confirmed the outage, saying “Some customers are facing intermittent issues accessing our NetBanking/MobileBanking App. We are looking into it on priority for resolution,” The lender further added “We apologize for the inconvenience and request you to try again after sometime. Thank you.”

Customers of the bank expressed their anguish with the outage on the lender’s platforms through various social media posts.

The RBI had in December asked HDFC Bank to stop all digital launches, as well as source new credit card customers. The order came in light of numerous outages across the lender’s electronic banking services, for which the regulator had asked the management to examine lapses. Between 2018 and 2020, HDFC Bank suffered three outages across its platforms, with the most recent outage, attributed to a power outage at the lender’s primary data centre, taking place in November 2020.

HDFC Bank in February 2021 had submitted a plan to the RBI to stop its glitches across its technology platforms, according to a report by The Economic Times (ET). The plan included various short term and long term measures – which would take upto three months to implement.



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HDFC Bank submits plan of action to RBI, hopes to fix outage issue in 3 months, BFSI News, ET BFSI

Banking & Finance

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New Delhi: The country’s largest private sector lender HDFC Bank has submitted a detailed plan of action to the RBI to address repeated service disruption issues due to outage and hopes to improve its technology platform in three months. Progress is being made on the plan of action provided to the RBI and the bank has taken this positively as it will raise the standard, according to a senior official of HDFC Bank.

The action plan will take 10-12 weeks for implementation, and further timeframe will depend on the RBI’s inspection. Based on the satisfaction level, the regulator will lift the ban, the official said at an analysts meet.

Last month, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) 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.

“RBI has issued an order dated December 2, 2020, to HDFC Bank Ltd with regard to certain incidents of outages in the internet banking/ mobile banking/ payment utilities of the bank over the past two years, including the recent outages in the bank’s internet banking and payment system on November 21, 2020, due to a power failure in the primary data centre,” HDFC Bank had said in a regulatory filing.

The bank has been penalised for two major outages, one in November 2018 and the other in December 2019.

Taking a stern view of the repeated outages, RBI Governor Shaktikanta had said the regulator had some concerns about certain deficiencies and it was necessary that the HDFC Bank strengthens its IT systems before expanding further.

“… we cannot have thousands and lakhs of customers who are using digital banking to be in any kind of difficulty for hours together and especially when we are ourselves giving so much emphasis on digital banking. Public confidence in digital banking has to be maintained,” Das had said in December.

HDFC Bank, the largest lender by assets in the private sector, has been classified as a systemically important entity by the RBI in the past. It is also the largest issuer of credit cards and has a significant share in the payment processing segment.

The bank is the largest issuer of credit cards and had 1.49 crore customers as of September 2020 while on the debit cards front, it had 3.38 crore customers.

Earlier, HDFC Bank’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer Shashidhar Jagdishan had apologised to customers and promised to work on the deficiencies.



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