Aadhaar authentication downtime represented only 0.85% of the year till September, Minister of State Rajeev Chandrasekhar said on X, formerly Twitter, on November 10. Mr. Chandrasekhar was responding to The Hindu’s story on November 10 which reported that Aadhaar authentication services have been down for a collective 54 hours and 33 minutes in 2023 till September.
“Over a total of 266 days and total use time of 6,384 hrs, these glitches of 54 [hours] 33 mins spread over 266 days as reported by @UIDAI represent only 0.85% glitches and 99.15% of uptime,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said, referring to the Unique Identification Authority of India, which administers the Aadhaar programme.
System upgrades
“Some of this very small downtime/glitches were planned for system upgrades and even during these very limited downtimes, other means of authentication were always available to authenticating agencies,” Mr. Chandrasekhar added, posting screenshots of the Right to Information response provided to The Hindu by the Aadhaar agency.
The Hindu had approached the UIDAI for a comment on this data on Tuesday. However, the agency did not provide a response.
Aadhaar authentications have taken place 100 billion times since the 12-digit resident identifier was launched. On a daily basis, 20–80 million authentications took place every day this October, either by biometrics, or a one-time passcode sent via SMS, for purposes like collecting rations or verifying identity for official purposes.
