BackHDFC Bank's December disruption owing to underestimation of payment volumes, not cyberattack
Sashidhar Jagdishan said that there was no cyberattack involved leading to the outage and it has said so to RBI as wellThe December disruption affected scores of HDFC Bank’s customers who complained that they were unable to pay their loan EMIs or settle credit card bills on time
PremiumHDFC Bank customers faced an outage of internet and mobile banking services in December last year not owing to any cyberattack but because the lender ‘underestimated’ growth in payment volumes and the disruption was more of a capacity issue, said Sashidhar Jagdishan, executive director, HDFC Bank on Saturday.
“What we did not realise is the kind of increase in businesses across liabilities, assets and payment products. Even within payment products, we have been patronising multiple channels, whether it is cards or the unified payments interface (UPI) volumes. We underestimated the growth in these volumes," he said.
He added that the bank has been adding capacities and monitoring it “practically every minute now" so that the monitoring mechanism has only heightened. “We have diverted a lot more traffic into multiple other channels and hope to be more comfortable in the next three to five months with lot more capacities being added," he said.
Jagdishan also said that there was no cyberattack involved leading to the outage and it has said so to RBI as well. “I can categorically say and we have said it to the regulator as well that there was no cyberattack on 2 December," he said.
The December disruption affected scores of HDFC Bank’s customers who complained that they were unable to pay their loan EMIs or settle credit card bills on time. RBI deputy governor M.K. Jain had said in December that the regulator has taken into account the outage and has deployed a team of experts to investigate into the matter. The RBI team will investigate the reasons behind the outage and accordingly give directions to HDFC Bank, Jain had said.
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