Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) has apparently had to shut down the portal that it uses to for Aadhaar seeding with provident fund accounts of its subscribers following an alleged data breach where confidential user information was stolen by hackers.

The issue was purportedly raised by EPFO Central Provident Fund Commissioner V P Joy in a letter to Common Service Centre (CSC) Chief Executive Dinesh Tyagi on March 23.

“The web portal has been closed one-and-a-half months ago, immediately after a possible data theft was reported to us during a process of routine security check. There was some problem in the application run by CSC and it is not related to our data centre that maintains the EPF accounts,” Joy told  on Wednesday.

Tyagi said that while the said application had been designed by the CSC, it was now hosted on EPFO data centres and servers. The EPFO shut down the website on March 22, urging the CSC to secure the confidential data of employees.

The report comes at a time when Aadhaar is embroiled in data breach allegations while also being at the centre of India's privacy debate. The Supreme Court is hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the Aadhaar Act and the use of biometric identifier in various government and non-government services.