New SMS rules suspended for a week as banking, ticket-booking, Co-Win suffer

On Monday, messaging witnessed a massive outage and bank, payment transaction, and all other OTP-based work, including that of Aadhaar and Co-Win.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Tuesday suspended the new norms for commercial tex messages for a week as institutions dealing with banking, payment saw massive disruption in SMS and OTP deliveries. The new norms, which came into effect on Monday, aims at filtering out spam messages. But now Trai has decided to give establishments a week's time to switch to the new system.

OTP-based services saw a massive outage on Monday after Trai implemented its new text message rule. (HT PHOTO)

What is the new system? All you need to know

> The new norms are based on blockchain technology and are aimed at curbing unsolicited and fraudulent messages.

> The new rules have been pending since 2019.

> Telecom companies, as mandated by Trai, switched to the new norms after Sunday midnight which caught many establishments off guard.

> According to the new rules, companies are to link themselves so that no fraudulent message, out of the registered format, does not get sent to customers.

> The SMS and OTPs, when sent by user entities will be checked against the templates pre-registered by them on the blockchain platform. This process is known as scrubbing.

> On Monday, messaging witnessed a massive outage and bank, payment transaction, and all other OTP-based work, including that of Aadhaar and Co-Win.

> Telecom operators blamed establishments for delaying the registration which led to the SMs outage. Bank and payment entities, on the other hand, said he implementation was faulty.

(With Agency Inputs