Security upgrade caused intermittent service interruptions: UIDAI

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) acknowledged on Saturday there were “some intermittent service interruptions” in its systems over the last week and attributed them to “an essential security upgrade”.

The authority, which is in charge of the Aadhaar identification system, said the upgrade was carried out in a phased manner, and the reported service interruptions occurred only in its enrolment and mobile update service facilities.

The authority’s statement comes a day after The Hindu reported that the UIDAI’s IT systems were down according to many users who were unable to update their Aadhaar particulars to correct mismatches with other identity documents. Matching of the citizen’s demographic details, such as name, gender and date of birth, in both the documents is a key requirement for linking Aadhaar with PAN. The UIDAI had not responded to queries sent by The Hindu.

UIDAI “was going through an essential security upgrade in its systems in a phased manner over the last week, some intermittent service interruptions were reported only in the enrolment and mobile update service facility at a few enrolment/update centres, which too is working fine now, after upgradation,” the statement said.

It added that all its services are “stable and functioning fine. There have been no outages in its Aadhaar – PAN/EPFO linking facility which is an authentication-based facility”.

“UIDAI further said that even though the system has stabilized, it is monitoring the same to ensure that no inconvenience is caused to the residents. It may be noted that more than 51 lakh residents have been enrolled in the last 9 days since the beginning of the upgradation process on 20th August 2021 at an average of 5.68 lakh enrolment per day while authentication transactions have taken place as usual on an average of more than 5.3 crore authentications per day,” it added. The Hindu