Unified Payment Interface (UPI) services faced major disruptions across various apps in India on Saturday, marking the fourth such technical snag within a month.
According to outage-tracking site DownDetector, users began reporting issues with UPI transactions around 11:26 a.m. The outage peaked at around 11:40 a.m., with over 222 reports of failed digital payments.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which oversees the UPI infrastructure, said it is working to resolve the disruption.
"NPCI is currently facing intermittent technical issues, leading to partial UPI transaction declines. We are working to resolve the issue, and will keep you updated. We regret the inconvenience caused," it said in a post on X.
Social media users reported difficulties making payments on third-party platforms such as Paytm, Google Pay and PhonePe.
"UPI is down again today, all payments are getting failed. At least there should be prior intimation sent in case of planned outage," one X user wrote,
Another posted, "I was not carrying cash and this downtime placed me in an awkward situation while paying fare to auto wala. Please, we need a zero-downtime UPI infra."
Saturday’s outage is the latest in a series of technical problems plaguing the popular real-time payment system. On March 26, UPI services were down for a few hours, with NPCI attributing the issue to "intermittent technical issues".
Just days later, on March 31, users faced trouble again due to payment processing issues, which NPCI said stemmed from bank-side delays during the financial year-end rush. Another brief disruption occurred on April 2 due to "latency in the UPI network".
The service disruptions come even as UPI payments are becoming more and more ubiquitous. The Finance Ministry said that UPI transactions in January surpassed 16.99 billion, with a total value exceeding Rs 23.48 lakh crore, a record high for any month.
It also highlighted UPI's critical role in India's digital payment ecosystem. "Unified Payments Interface (UPI) remains the cornerstone of India's digital payment ecosystem, contributing to 80 per cent of the retail payments across the country," the ministry said, as quoted by PTI.
Source: India Today