Nationwide UPI Outage Disrupts Digital Payments for Millions in India

Major UPI Service Disruption Hits Users Across India

New Delhi: A significant outage of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) service occurred on Saturday, impacting millions of users across the country.

The disruption affected various online payment platforms, complicating local shopping, bill payments, and business transactions.

As reported by the outage monitoring service Down Detector, there were 2,358 complaints logged by 1 PM, with the majority of issues related to payments (81%) and fund transfers (17%).

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which oversees UPI operations, attributed the disruptions to technical difficulties.

In a statement shared on the social media platform X, NPCI noted, “We are currently experiencing intermittent technical issues, resulting in partial declines of UPI transactions.”

They added, “We are actively working to rectify the situation and will provide updates. We apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

The outage also impacted major banking applications from SBI, ICICI, and HDFC, indicating a larger problem within the UPI network infrastructure.

One frustrated user on X remarked, “UPI is down again. Good thing I always carry cash. Cash is always King.”

Another user expressed concern, stating, “This is happening way too often now. First UPI goes down, then banks announce their own ‘downtime’ for UPI transactions.”

According to the latest NPCI data, UPI transactions saw a 13.59% month-on-month increase, reaching 18.3 billion in March, up from 16.11 billion in February.

March also recorded a staggering Rs 24.77 lakh crore in UPI transactions, marking a 12.79% rise from Rs 21.96 lakh crore in February.

On average, the UPI network handled over 590 million transactions daily, totaling Rs 79,910 crore, as per NPCI statistics.

Year-over-year, the record UPI transactions of Rs 24.77 lakh crore in March represented a 25% increase in value and a remarkable 36% growth in volume, showcasing the rapid advancement of India's digital payment landscape.

UPI has experienced robust growth in both person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) transactions.