UPI Down For Thousands Of Users Across Country

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services were finally restored late on Wednesday (March 26) after a technical outage knocked out the digital payments service for users across the country. 

In a post on X, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) attributed the outage to “intermittent technical issues”, without elaborating further. 

“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 payments body said.

This followed users facing issues while making online payments via third-party application providers (TPAPs) such as Google Pay, Paytm, among others. As per online outage tracking platform Downdetector, the issue started cropping up at around 6:30 PM. 

The number of complaints of outages for UPI spiked sharply around 8 PM on Wednesday as 3,000 users reported issues on the platform. 

Increasing Number Of UPI Outages

This was the fourth major outage for UPI in the past year. In February 2024, UPI services went down temporarily across the country, with the NPCI attributing the outage to “some technical issues” on the side of partner banks. 

In June last year, media publications reported that users who placed orders for mutual fund units on June 4 were given NAV for June 5. Afterwards, the BSE clarified that there was no technical glitch on its end, adding that there was a lag in receiving payments from the UPI channel for a few customers.

In August 2024, a ransomware attack on C-Edge Technologies, a technology service provider for banks, impacted UPI services for about 300 small banks.

Nevertheless, digital payments continue to see rapid adoption across the country on the back of rising smartphone and internet penetration. As per NPCI data, UPI clocked 16.11 Bn transactions worth INR 21.96 Lakh Cr in February 2025 against 16.99 Bn worth INR 23.48 Lakh Cr in January.