It’s always nice when a multi-billion dollar corporation says Hi to its users, but the effect is somewhat lost when it follows it up with a “ghvkjfjg”.
A bug in Paytm’s systems appears to have sent a notification saying “Hey ghvkjfjg” to many of the people who’d had its app installed. Users were surprised when they received the notification, which appeared like a normal Paytm notification from Paytm on their phones, but with the strange text instead of the offers and updates that Paytm usually provides. Many took to Twitter to share screenshots.
Some speculated it was the handiwork of an overworked developer who was testing his code at 12 in the morning.
Today paytm testing on live application notification. #Paytm #DigitalIndia #bank #Banking #indianmedia pic.twitter.com/1BLwDDSjTc
— Pratik Chauhan (@pratik1427) January 6, 2019
Hey @Paytm.. Looks like someone is testing notifications #ghvkjfjg pic.twitter.com/J1yAQ9vEAh
— Yogesh Joshi (@yogeshsjoshi) January 5, 2019
While others speculated that the app had been hacked.
#Paytm is one of the most popular banking apps in #India, it has sent a dummy and fake notification to its users in the midnight. Just imagine the reaction of hacker, who is trying to hack your profile. After realizing that, he has sent a notification to the millions. pic.twitter.com/DqTCcITgIo
— Tanisha B (@TanishaBatra80) January 7, 2019
Some people did some digging to figure out technical reasons behind why the notification had been sent.
@Paytmcare @vijayshekhar Today at 12:19Am I received a notification from paytm app stating hey and some text kind of msg. So I simply ignored it without clicking. But later I thought is it a kind of hacker trap.Just check screenshot taken from notification logger.
Is it harmful? pic.twitter.com/3vOCAen9Ao— VIJAY (@VIJAYVijju143) January 5, 2019
The speculation was put to rest when Paytm came out with a statement. “We apologize for the test push notification some of you may have received from Paytm App. It was a testing error by us. We are ensuring that such errors are eliminated completely in future,” Paytm tweeted at 1:48 in the morning, around an hour after the notification had been sent.
We apologize for the test push notification some of you may have received from Paytm App. It was a testing error by us. We are ensuring that such errors are eliminated completely in future.
— Paytm (@Paytm) January 5, 2019
This isn’t the first time an Indian startup has been trigger-happy with its notifications. In 2016, Myntra had spammed hundreds of its users informing them that their orders had been dispatched, when users hadn’t made any orders in the first place. Myntra had later declared the notifications to have been caused by a technical glitch, and apologized to its users.
Paytm has done the same, and it’s likely that most users will see the lighter side of the story. Users are anyway spammed with notifications from all their apps constantly on their phones; a notification, especially one that went hey, can’t have caused too much extra trouble other than providing light-hearted comic relief to some subsection of Paytm’s userbase.