SMSes and OTPs were not coming or received for a host of digital payments after telecom companies implemented a new set of Trai s regulations for commercial text messages.
Telcos blamed companies and government bodies for lax adoption, saying they had failed to register sender ids and content on the blockchain platforms of telcos, which in turn triggered the high failure rate.
Responding to the outages felt across banking and e-commerce services, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has put on hold implementation of its regulations to curb unsolicited commercial communication. Users failed to receive text messages including one time passwords for online transactions , and banks attributed the glitches to Trai’s new regulations which came into effect on Monday. The regulator has now given service providers another week to adhere to the norms, though banks and payment gateway firms said on Tuesday that 60-70 per cent of their messages were delivered to customers.
Trai regulations were introduced in 2018 and a framework was put in place to protect customers from fraud and phishing. Under these regulations, companies which send messages are registered and the messages are verified by telecom companies using a block chain-based solution. Text messages from unregistered sender IDs or headers are blocked.
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