On 29 May 2022, several customers of the HDFC Bank of Chennai turned into millionaires for a few hours.
This happened due to a technical glitch on the Bank’s end when a few customers found a lump sum deposited in their accounts. Some accounts even reported a deposit of Rs 13 crores. However, the HDFC bank later stated that not all accounts received the same amount.
Many customers soon posted screenshots on social media of the messages received from the bank about the deposited money. A user tweeted about how his bank account was showing a deposit of Rs 2.49 crores. Another user tweeted that his wife’s HBFC Bank account balance increased to Rs 1.23 crores and at the noon of the same day the balance vanished.
A report suggested that around Rs 13 crores each, in total were deposited in the bank accounts of almost 100 customers. But later these reports were denied by HDFC Bank saying that the amount deposited in the accounts was not the same.
HDFC officials later confirmed that these issues were only constrained to a few accounts associated with HDFC Bank branches situated in Chennai. The epicentre of this problem was at a bank branch on Usman Road, Thiyagaraya Nagar in Chennai. All this occurred due to a breaking down of the software patch.
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Soon after this issue became apparent, the bank officials decided to suspend the account of those customers who are withdrawing any excess money which was, accidentally deposited into their accounts.
Officials assured that around 80% of the issue was resolved on the evening of 29 May 2022. But even till today the problem is not completely solved. Bank officials are trying hard to recover all the excess amount from the customers.
According to a report, the bank is trying to require the amount worth Rs 100 crores from around 4,468 accounts.
Another report suggests that some customers are not cooperating with the bank in the fund’s recovery process. It is happening due to the continuous harassment by the bank officials and that the bank is threatening them of taking legal measures.
HDFC Bank was under the constant surveillance of the central bank for its regular technical glitches. The RBI lifted the limitations earlier in March this year.
Following are some of the technical issues faced by the HDFC bank:-
1) New Mobile Banking App Crashed- In November 2018, the new HDFC banking app launched crashed.
2) Mobile Banking App Outage- In December 2019, one of the bank’s vendor’s system upgrade patches failed and became faulty.
3) Data Centre Outage- In November 2020, the whole system was hacked by a third party which led to an error in the system.
4) Net Banking Downtime- On 1 March 2021, a faulty signature on Bank’s HIPS (Host Intrusion prevention software) led to slowing up the response of the Net Banking process. This affected several customers, Indian as well as global.
5) Net Banking Downtime 2- On 31 March 2021, an issue on the part of the bank’s database server’s hardware component failure led to a slow response in their net banking process.
These are some of the many issues of the HDFC bank due to their mistakes, and because of this, the customers had to face challenges.
At the end of the day, HDFC Bank has to look after the issues and solve them with strategies, investments, and re-skills so that, the customers don’t have to face these challenges because of the bank.
The major focus of the bank should be solving the technical problems and strengthening the security enhancements to improve its customer service. Currently, the bank should try to recover the funds in a customer-friendly manner.
edited and proofread by nikita sharma
