UPI faces third outage in a month, users struggle with digital payments
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India’s widely used Unified Payments Interface (UPI) system experienced another major disruption on Saturday morning, marking its third outage in less than a month.
The recurring technical issues have left users across the country frustrated, as digital transactions through apps like Google Pay and Paytm once again came to a standstill.
According to real-time monitoring platform DownDetector, over 1,100 complaints were reported by the afternoon, with Google Pay users registering 96 issues and Paytm users logging 23. The exact cause of the latest disruption has not yet been disclosed.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which oversees UPI operations, confirmed the issue in a brief statement: "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."
This is the third such incident in 20 days.
On April 2, users reported 514 complaints due to a slowdown in UPI transaction success rates, attributed to "fluctuations" in bank processing speeds. On March 26, a larger outage resulted in over 3,000 complaints, with users of Google Pay and Paytm unable to transact for nearly 2–3 hours.
As reliance on UPI continues to grow across India for everything from grocery shopping to paying utility bills, these frequent disruptions raise concerns over the system’s reliability and the need for stronger infrastructure to handle the increasing load.
For now, users are advised to have alternative payment methods on hand while NPCI works to stabilise the network.
