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UPI, or Unified Payments Interface, appears to be facing a second outage in a week, impacting users of online payment apps such as PhonePe, BHIM, Google Pay (GPay), Paytm , and Amazon Pay. According to the internet disruption watchdog Downdetector, the outage reports touched 533 at 7:40 pm IST, with an upward trend in the functionality’s downtime.
At the time of writing, roughly 57 per cent of outage reports were about failure in fund transfers, while 39 per cent of issues impacted payments. A mere 4 per cent of reports affected the app ecosystem powered by UPI, according to the data on Downdetector.
The last outage on March 26 lasted for over two hours, with reports crossing 3,000 within an hour. Just like this outage, the last one prevented users from making online payments to individuals and merchants. That means neither QR code-based payments nor mobile number-linked transfers were working, leaving several users stranded at airports, railway stations, bus stations, and outside of shops in markets. The outage’s impact was such that affected users urged bringing back the old era of handing cash notes.
While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has not acknowledged the downtime in the UPI services, it blamed the last outage on “intermittent technical issues.” While the system was restored hours after the outage began, it brought a significant part of India’s digital landscape to a standstill.
Earlier this week, NPCI said several users were facing payment failures but it was not because UPI servers were down. According to the government agency, some banks were facing transaction declines because of the financial year closing. “UPI system is working fine, and we are working with the concerned banks for necessary redressal,” it wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
An outage of such scale had a huge impact because of high transaction volume. According to NPCI, 565.72 million transactions were carried out on March 31, totalling a transaction value of ₹75,980.99 crore.
