UPI Down: Third UPI Outage in a Month Sparks Fears Over India’s Digital Payment Stability

India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services saw a complete disruption on Saturday morning, rendering users nationwide incapable of making digital monetary transactions. It is the third disruption in the last month, hitting individuals and businesses that use UPI for hassle-free and instant money transfer.

Based on DownDetector, a service that monitors live service disruptions, approximately 1,168 issues were reported by Saturday afternoon. Google Pay users reported 96 issues, and Paytm users had 23 issues complained about. The reason for the disruption is yet to be identified.

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The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body that governs the UPI system, released a statement admitting the issue: "NPCI is experiencing intermittent technical glitches, resulting in partial UPI transaction failures. We are trying to fix the issue and will keep you posted. We apologize for the inconvenience."

This outage comes against the backdrop of a pattern of repeated disruptions in UPI services that have been impacting digital payments across the country. UPI, now a part of the daily financial life of India, is utilized on a large scale for anything from peer-to-peer transactions to commercial transactions. The repeated outages are raising questions about the stability of the system.

Earlier UPI Outages

The first of the recent outages was on March 26, when a large number of users experienced service disruptions. In that incident, more than 3,000 complaints were logged on DownDetector, with popular apps such as Google Pay and Paytm being among the ones impacted. Users could not access UPI services for about two to three hours.

Another failure was noted on April 2, when there were 514 complaints registered. In that instance, nearly 52% of the users had issues while trying to make money transfers. The NPCI said the issue arose due to "fluctuations" in bank success rates, which led to increased latency and slower transactions. The company added that it was cooperating with the partner banks to stabilize the network.

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The latest series of outages, Saturday's being the latest, serve to highlight increasing concerns about the stability of India's digital payment ecosystem. As UPI continues to gain traction for daily transactions, frequent disruptions not only inconvenience users but also present challenges for businesses that depend on smooth digital payments.

While the NPCI struggles to restore services and enhance system stability, consumers and industry players are calling for greater transparency and better fail-safes to ensure that outages do not happen again. Until that happens, the frequent failures of such a key system keep raising doubts over the resilience of India's digital economy.

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