UPI Down for Thousands Of Users In India, Third Outage in a Month

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services were interrupted across India on Saturday due to a technical glitch, affecting thousands of users and businesses. According to outage tracking website DownDetector, over 2,100 complaints were registered by 12:56 pm, with most users reporting failed payment attempts.

This marks the third major UPI outage in less than a month, raising questions about the reliability of India’s most-used payment infrastructure.

Popular digital wallets such as Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm were also affected, with users taking to social media to express frustration over failed transactions. The issue affected both peer-to-peer payments and merchant transactions, leading to significant disruptions in daily operations for small businesses and service providers.

“Unable to complete even basic payments at grocery stores and cabs,” said a user on X, tagging multiple payment apps.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which oversees UPI operations, acknowledged the glitch and said the issue has been resolved.

“NPCI had faced intermittent technical issues owing to which UPI had partial decline. The same has been addressed now and the system has stabilised. Regret the inconvenience,” NPCI posted on X.

Though services were gradually restored, the repeated nature of such outages has sparked concern among users and experts about the system’s reliability.

This is the third outage reported in just 30 days. On March 26, a large-scale UPI failure left users unable to transact for several hours. Another brief disruption occurred on April 2. While each instance was eventually resolved, the frequency has raised alarm over the robustness of India’s digital payments backbone.

Digital transactions in India have soared in recent years, with UPI clocking over 13 billion transactions in March 2024 alone, according to NPCI data.

Experts have urged NPCI and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to conduct a comprehensive audit of UPI infrastructure to ensure scalability and stability.

“Repeated outages in such a critical system undermine public trust. We need both transparency and accountability,” said fintech analyst Rajiv Bansal.

NPCI has not issued further clarification on the root cause of the glitch. Users are advised to check with their respective apps for updates before initiating high-value transactions.