The rush of last-minute recharges for availing Reliance Jio’s Prime Membership offer seems to have taken down Billdesk, one of India’s largest payment processing services.
As of 10:40 AM, both the Billdesk website and the payment gateway service has been down for several minutes.
Billdesk is the provider of payment processing services for Jio’s website and its wallet service ‘Jio Money’.
[polldaddy poll=9712152] UPDATE: Jio will release details of its extended deadline by around 8 PM today. You can read the details here after the details are released.
At the time of writing this story, recharges and top-ups on Jio’s website and Money app are failing at the point of verification by Billdesk.
Something similar had happened on the first day when Prime membership was opened to the public.
However, at the time, Jio was operating its own payments backend, and Billdesk was brought in to help deal with the load.
Meanwhile the operator had been warning its users via SMS over the last few days to recharge their numbers in advance and not wait for the last minute.
From tomorrow, two of the operator’s schemes will become unavailable — Jio Prime membership and Buy One Get One.
Under the former, users get nearly double the data on each recharge compared to people who are not members of the club.
Under the Buy One Get One offer, users can get extra data on each recharge, on top of the benefits that come from the loyalty club membership.
You can check if the website is back by clicking here.
UPDATE: Jio’s recharge infrastructure has also come under pressure.