(Representative image)

BENGALURU: There was widespread concern on Tuesday as thousands of private sector bank customers saw their online transactions fail -- attributed by some lenders to increased traffic due to online offers coinciding with payday. However, the downtime coincided with news of bank stress, plunging bank stocks and rumours in social media to send a wave of alarm through customers.

Videos of the plight of PMC Bank victims went viral, creating panic -- further exacerbated by failed online transactions at private banks such as Yes Bank , HDFC Bank , Kotak Mahindra Bank and IDFC First Bank. Bank users kept reporting that they were unable to pay rent, school fees and other dues on the first of the month.

Banks said the reason for the failures was a combination of festive season purchases, offers from e-commerce sites and payday for salaried professionals. A Kotak Mahindra Bank spokesperson said the bank would deploy additional servers to cope with the higher than anticipated volumes. An HDFC Bank spokesperson said its systems were back to normal by evening and had faced some issues in the morning, which had been resolved. HDFC Bank on Monday had launched its own festival offer to complement that of e-commerce firms.

Concerns triggered by PMC Bank were further fuelled by a negative research report on Yes Bank. RBI responded by reassuring customers that rumours of banks being shut down were baseless.

Yes Bank on Tuesday retweeted and quoted RBI's statements after the bank faced a deluge of enquiries from its worried depositors. While Yes Bank has not responded to requests for comment, online the bank reassured its customers that the netbanking problem was temporary and normal services would soon be restored.

Yes Bank customers like Satish Bhatnagar complained that during an NEFT transaction, money had been debited from their Yes Bank account but not credited to the receiver bank. Yes Bank responded, "We are facing some technical issues. Regular services are expected to resume shortly. We regret the inconvenience caused."

On its netbanking site, the standard message flashed to customers was, "Dear customer, due to heavy traffic on our netbanking we are temporarily unable to process your request. Please try again later or use Yes Mobile App to carry out your transactions."

HDFC Bank's website also responded similarly to customers. "Dear user, the netbanking system is busy processing heavy load from currently logged in customers, request to try after some time. thank you for your cooperation."

Read this report in Marathi

