Hour-long UPI glitch hits millions

Users across multiple UPI apps including Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm and across multiple onboarding banks such as HDFC, Axis, and SBI were affected

New Delhi

NPCI had faced intermittent technical issues owing to which UPI had partial decline. (Representative file photo)

A technical glitch affected millions of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) users for about an hour on Wednesday when the ubiquitous mobile payments mechanism was mostly offline, except for intermittent transactions going through.

Users across multiple UPI apps including Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm and across multiple onboarding banks such as HDFC, Axis, and SBI were affected. The scale of the outage was not known. UPI had 424 million unique users in June 2024, according to a Reserve Bank of India report.

“NPCI had faced intermittent technical issues owing to which UPI had partial decline. The same has been addressed now and the system has stabilised. Regret the inconvenience,” the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) tweeted on Wednesday.

NPCI is a not-for-profit company that provides the infrastructure for digital payments and settlement systems including UPI, IMPS (Immediate Payment Service), AePS (Aadhaar-enabled Payment System), and FASTags.

Between March 1 and March 25, 14,736.11 million transactions worth ₹20,00,917.59 crore had taken place through UPI, according to the official NPCI website.

Outages at a bank level, instead of across the UPI system, are slightly more common.

According to the Cert-In directions of April 22, organisations such as NPCI are “mandatorily” required to report any incidents that affect digital payment systems to Cert-In within six hours of noticing such incidents. It is not known if NPCI did so.

To be sure, this incident was observed after 6pm on Wednesday. NPCI posted an official tweet at 8:42 pm. Thus, NPCI would have time until after midnight to report the incident to Cert-In.

HT has reached out to both Cert-In and NPCI for more information.