Why Have UPI Outages Become Frequent? Here’s What NPCI Said

India’s digital payments landscape saw a widespread disruption as UPI went down on Wednesday. The outage, which began after 7:30 pm IST, prevented users of leading digital payments apps, such as PhonePe, BHIM, Google Pay (GPay), and Paytm , from transferring funds, making peer-to-peer payments, and accessing other services.

With far-reaching impacts on online payments, the fresh disruptions come for the second time in a week. The last outage was on March 26, massively crashing the digital payments ecosystem. So much so that people called for the cash economy to come back. Several frustrated users took to X (formerly Twitter) to claim they were stranded at airports, railway stations, and outside of shops. The second outage on a Wednesday evening adds to that frustration.

While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has not yet acknowledged the outage, it confirmed the one that happened in March was caused by “intermittent technical glitches” and that the services were restored. “NPCI had faced intermittent technical issues owing to which UPI had [a] partial decline. The same has been addressed now and the system has stabilised. Regret the inconvenience,” it wrote on X.

What caused the outages earlier on Wednesday is unclear, but it may likely have occurred due to technical issues.

NPCI has also confirmed that some payment failures occur on the bank’s side. For instance, payment failures on April 1 were due to “financial year closing,” while the UPI system was working fine. This could also be a reason why UPI suffered an outage.

While they cannot make payments unless UPI servers are back, they can try handing out money in cash. An alternative is using UPI Lite, which is a wallet that can store up to ₹2,000 and allow payment of ₹1,000 at once. If the money is stuck, it should ideally be refunded, according to NPCI.