The Reserve Bank of India has enquired with banks whether their customer-facing channels- branches, ATM, mobile banking and net banking – were operating well after technical problem at the US tech giant Microsoft and its vendor American cyber security company Crowdstrike, led to a global tech outage.
The banking regulator has made similar enquiries with payment aggregators, they added. The banking regulator has asked banks and payment aggregators to update them on the impact of the outage.
Most banks and payment companies told ET that their services were not affected. Speaking to a wire agency, Dinesh Khara indicated that their systems were not affected. “We are all fine,” he told the wire agency.
HDFC Bank confirmed that its systems are unaffected by the global outage.
“There is no impact on banking operations,” said Ramesh Lakshminarayan, CIO & Group Head – IT, HDFC Bank.
Another banking official said that the Reserve Bank had asked them to make sure that all ecosystem participants including their subsidiaries were operating fine.
“RBI has asked us to submit a status update on the global outage, Payments Council of India (PCI) is compiling our response and submitting it,” an official at a payments company said.
Money market operations
Trade in government bonds was largely unaffected, with the dealing system housed on the Clearing Corporation of India Limited regularly updating transactions in government securities.
The RBIs Negotiated Dealing System – Order Matching (NDS-OM), which is the platform for government bond trade, is housed on the CCIL.
However, some banks faced issues from their end while placing bids for Friday’s government bond auction worth Rs 31,000 crore, dealers said.
The bids for the government bond auction are placed through the RBI‘s e-Kuber platform which is the central bank’s Core Banking Solution system.
“The e-Kuber platform is accessed through banks’ individual systems which run on Microsoft. Some banks faced issues during the auction due to the shutdowns but the matter was resolved quickly and did not have a large impact,” a senior treasury executive at a private bank said.
The result of the auction, published by the RBI, showed that the government successfully sold two bonds worth Rs 31,000 crore.
A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted flights, banks and companies around the world on Friday. Escalating disruptions continued hours after the technology company said it was gradually fixing an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 apps and services.
The glitch is causing users to see the Blue Screen of Death error messages that caused their computers to shut down or restart.
