Bhubaneswar, Oct. 1: All branches of State Bank of India across the state, as well as in other parts of the country, will remain open tomorrow despite October 2 being a national holiday and a Sunday.

The decision was taken to provide relief to customers who had a harrowing experience today because of a system glitch.

This happened because of a recurring outage of network connectivity at the SBI’s central CBS (core banking solution) server, the link failure leading to chaos and confusion at almost all its branches.

“All SBI branches will remain open on Sunday throughout the state,” said All Orissa Bank Officers Association’s general secretary Ganesh Mishra.

“We have informed the customers (about branches being open on Sunday) through advertisements in leading vernacular dailies,” said the SBI’s public relations officer P. Swain.

Bank customers were seen standing in serpentine queues in front of counters waiting for bank transactions. To their disappointment, transactions could not take place till evening.

This apart, all banks in the state will remain open on Monday and Wednesday while Tuesday and Thursday will be holidays.

“I waited for several hours to deposit money but there was no link available. Finally, I gave up and decided to return home in the evening,” said a visibly exhausted and disappointed Manoj Sahu, a businessman.

“Despite our attempts to normalise bank transactions, link was not available. Bank transactions could not take place as the server was slow,” said Ashok Kumar Das, assistant general manager of SBI Bhubaneswar main branch.

He said full hour services would be available tomorrow.

ATMs were, however, functioning normally. Apprehending further trouble in bank transactions, customers were seen withdrawing money from ATM counters. “After hearing the news that bank transactions were disrupted, I decided to withdraw money from the ATM as tomorrow is a holiday,” said Ashok Pradhan, a local resident.