India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system faced a major disruption on March 26, leaving users across the country unable to make digital transactions. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) confirmed that services were restored late in the evening after what it described as “intermittent technical issues.”
NPCI addressed the outage in a post on X (formerly Twitter), stating:
“UPI faced partial declines due to intermittent technical issues. The problem has now been resolved, and the system has stabilized. We regret the inconvenience caused.”
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What Happened?
According to outage tracking platform Downdetector, UPI issues began around 6:30 PM, affecting major third-party payment apps like Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm. The situation worsened by 8 PM, with over 3,000 users reporting transaction failures.
Recurring UPI Failures Raising Concerns
This marks the fourth major UPI outage in a year. Previous disruptions include:
• February 2024: A nationwide outage caused by partner bank issues, as per NPCI.
• June 2023: A delay in UPI payments impacted mutual fund transactions, causing discrepancies in Net Asset Values (NAVs). The BSE later clarified that the issue stemmed from a lag in payment processing rather than a system-wide glitch.
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With digital payments becoming an essential part of everyday transactions, frequent outages in India’s most widely used payment system have raised concerns about reliability. While NPCI has not disclosed further details about the March 26 outage, users will be hoping for a more stable system in the future.
