Currently, not every company uses DigiLocker for e-KYC. Many companies also leverage other solutions, such as Aadhaar-based e-KYC through the UIDAI system, or integrate third-party KYC providers.

The DigiLocker outage, which disrupted digital KYC processes for fintech#fe firms, brokers, and other businesses, has led to calls from companies and tech experts to improve the resilience of digital public infrastructure (DPI) to avoid similar issues in the future.

They said the government should consider implementation of redundancy systems, by developing a backup, or failover system for DigiLocker that ensures that businesses can continue functioning even in case of technical failures.

A power outage at the data centre of the government’s National Informatics Centre (NIC) on December 31 in Delhi led to disruptions at the DigiLocker for the next two days. DigiLocker is a cloud-based platform for storage, sharing and verification of documents, and certificates. The outage also affected many government websites, leading to a slow or no response.

Officials said the data centre power outage has been restored.

The issue, however, slowed down user onboarding for companies who are required to do digital KYC before signing up users to verify their identity.

“We got thousands of support tickets because of delayed KYC approvals. DigiLocker has restored its services as of now,” said Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder of CoinDCX.

As of December 30, 2024, DigiLocker has 434.53 million registered users and has issued 9.41 billion documents.

Abhishek Saxena, co-founder and MD of Omnicard, a corporate expense management company, said, “While it was not a complete shutdown, there was a 50% drop in onboarding of users due to the DigiLocker issue.”

According to Saxena, outages are common in the technology world but it is really important for the government to have more such platforms in place so that DigiLocker is not overloaded.

Notably, India has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on cooperation in the field of sharing successful digital solutions implemented at population scale with 10 countries – Armenia, Sierra Leone, Suriname, Antigua and Barbuda, Papua New Guinea, Trinidad and Tobago, Tanzania, Kenya, Cuba and Colombia. Many other countries are also enquiring about India’s DPI stack.

Source:FETechbytes.in

Please like and follow your gaming and all knowledge quester @Kvkartikji04