HDFC Network Failure Leaves Customers Stranded

If you’re wondering why transactions with HDFC Bank have been failing today, it’s because their networks have been on the blink from early this morning. A network outage that started in the wee hours of the morning still continues, leaving millions of customers in the country stranded.

A message on the bank’s website claims that the outage is due to system maintenance, but Neeraj Jha, corporate communications, HDFC Bank, while negating fears of a security lapse stated that the network failure has taken them by surprise and has taken longer to troubleshoot than they had originally estimated.

HDFC had estimated the network to be back up by 10.30 am today, but as per the latest message on their site, this has been pushed back to 7 pm.

Although lack of access to the bank’s net banking portal is country wide, only ATMs in Mumbai have been affected by this outage. HDFC Bank has refused to answer further queries until the issue has been fixed.

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With all the buzz and investments in Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions in the BFSI space, this network failure raises questions on the effectiveness of these strategies, as also seen in the recent case of Airtel’s week-long network outage resulting from a fire.

Organisations are investing large sums in these solutions, but are often seen lacking in the event of a disaster. This leads us to ask whether just an investment in these high-fangled solutions is enough. What are companies doing to test the effectiveness of these solutions and are regular drills conducted to this effect? As evident in the case of HDFC Bank and Airtel, visibly not!