Reserve Bank of India website hit with 14X traffic post PM Modi's demonetization speech

Among the millions who have been impacted by India’s surprise announcement to invalidate much of its cash is also the country's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Following the announcement on Nov. 8, the RBI website became unresponsive to millions while simply crashing for the rest of us. According to web analytics firm SimilarWeb, the RBI website was hit with 14 times more traffic than usual the day after the announcement

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Image: SimilarWeb

Indians thronged to the central bank's website to get more details about the surprise announcements Prime Minister Narendra Modi made at a televised address Nov. 8 evening. The announcement caught even the media by surprise and details were hard to come by in the first 24 hours as confusion reigned supreme with rumors flooding WhatsApp groups and even some media reports. The RBI website was one of the few reliable sources for verified information.

On the morning of Nov. 9, the website was reported to be down by many, but things went back to normal shortly afterwards. "The bounce rate was not affected by the announcement, so if the site crashed it was probably only for a short time," Ariel Rosenstein, Senior Marketing Director at SimilarWeb told Mashable India.

To ensure that the RBI website isn’t hit with DDoS attacks (a common internet security attack wherein a server is sent tons of bogus requests, forcing it to exhaust all its resources and eventually go down), CloudFlare, the content delivery network for RBI, has implemented captcha on the website. This forces all the visitors (any suspected request) on the website to authenticate themselves first before entering.

Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO of CloudFlare, declined to comment, noting that their policy is to not comment on customers without their permission. 

The RBI website continues to witness much more traffic than pre-demonetization days as the government continues to tweak rules on a daily basis.