UPI Nationwide Outage Disrupts Digital Payments Across India

New Delhi, April 12: Digital payments via Unified Payments Interface (UPI) service suffered a nationwide outage on Saturday which affected millions of users.

Digital services on several online payment platforms were disrupted, hindering local shopping, bill payments and business transactions.

According to the outage tracking platform Down Detector, there were 2,358 complaints by 1 pm. Most reported problems were for payments (81 per cent) and fund transfers (17 per cent).

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates the UPI services, said the disruptions were due to technical issues.

"NPCI is currently facing intermittent technical issues, leading to partial UPI transaction declines," the NPCI, shared in a post on social media platform X.

"We are working to resolve the issue and will keep you updated. We regret the inconvenience caused," it added.

Major banking apps from SBI, ICICI, and HDFC were also affected, pointing to a broader issue within the UPI network infrastructure.

"UPI is down again. Good that I always carry cash. Cash is always King," posted one affected user on X.

"This is becoming way too frequent nowadays. First UPI goes down, then banks declare their own 'downtime' for UPI transactions," another user wrote.

The UPI saw a 13.59 per cent increase (on-month) in transaction volume at 18.3 billion in the month of March, from 16.11 billion in February, as per the latest NPCI data.

The month of March saw a record Rs 24.77 lakh crore worth UPI-based transactions, up 12.79 per cent from Rs 21.96 lakh crore in February.

On a daily basis, the UPI network recorded more than 590 million average transactions at Rs 79,910 crore daily transaction count, according to the NPCI data.

On a year-on-year basis, the record-breaking UPI transactions of Rs 24.77 lakh crore in March marked a 25 per cent surge in value and an impressive 36 per cent growth in volume, demonstrating the unstoppable momentum of India's digital payments revolution.

UPI saw strong growth in both person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) payments.

Reader Comments

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Rahul K.

This is really frustrating! I was at a store and had to leave without my groceries because UPI wasn't working. NPCI needs better infrastructure if we're going cashless. 😤

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Priya M.

While outages happen, I appreciate NPCI being transparent about the issue. Technical problems can occur in any system. Hope they fix it soon! 🤞

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Arjun S.

This shows why we still need cash as backup. I always keep some emergency money in my wallet. Digital is great, but not 100% reliable yet.

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Sunita R.

As a small business owner, this outage cost me at least 30% of today's sales. Many customers just walked away when UPI failed. NPCI should compensate merchants for these losses.

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Vikram J.

The growth numbers are impressive, but reliability needs to keep pace. Maybe NPCI should invest more in redundancy systems before expanding further.

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Neha P.

Was trying to pay my electricity bill last minute before the due date. Now I'll probably get a late fee because of this outage. So stressful! 😫

We welcome thoughtful discussions from our readers. Please keep comments respectful and on-topic.