Calcutta, Oct. 1: The State Bank of India will keep its branches across the country open tomorrow, a Sunday and a national holiday for Gandhi Jayanti, to provide relief to customers who had a harrowing experience today because of a system glitch.

SBI transactions were hit all over the country today but the impact was felt the worst in Puja-bound Bengal, where long queues had formed before banks since morning ahead of a scheduled five-day bank closure from tomorrow.

There was chaos at almost all SBI branches because of a recurring outage of network connectivity at the bank’s central CBS (core banking solution) server.

Following this, Mamata Banerjee spoke to Pranab Mukherjee. She said she had requested the Union finance minister to see that all public sector banks stayed open tomorrow so people could withdraw money ahead of Puja.

“I have spoken to Pranabbabu over the phone. Because the SBI’s satellite link was down, a lot of people, not only in Bengal but also in other parts of India, faced problems today ahead of Puja and during the ongoing Navratri,” Mamata said this afternoon.

While the SBI officially announced it would stay open on Sunday, there was no communication from other public sector banks.

If the other banks do not open, customers can only withdraw and deposit money at SBI branches tomorrow —cheques from any other bank cannot be cleared on Sunday.

“This (the SBI move) is good news. I sent my driver to the bank this morning to withdraw money, but he returned as there was a link failure,” said Ajit Bhattacharyya, a Salt Lake resident.

Unlike other Saturdays, many bank branches did not close transactions at 12.30pm but continued them till the evening to help customers.

Some people had trouble withdrawing money from ATMs too. “I visited the State Bank ATM in my locality three times but could not withdraw money because of the link failure,” said Raja Dutta, a Kankurgachhi resident.

All banks now use centralised online real-time exchange (Core) applications, which work through a centralised data centre. Deposits and withdrawals are reflected immediately on the bank’s servers, and a customer can withdraw or deposit money at any of the bank’s branches.

“Due to recurring connectivity problems in the CBS server, normal functioning of our branches got hampered on Saturday,” the SBI said.

There were long queues outside other banks too, because of the festive season and also because many people’s salaries are credited on the first day of the month. Many banks claimed they had opened extra counters.

Prashanta Dutta had to wait almost an hour at HDFC Bank’s Stephen House branch. “When I arrived at 11am, there were 50 people in front of me,” he said.