UPI Outage: NPCI Directs Banks To Limit ‘Check Transaction’ API Usage

In view of the mega unified payments interface (UPI) outage earlier this month, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has issued a circular to PSP (Payment Service Provider) banks to curb future crises.

The retail payments body, in a circular, said that the PSP banks and acquiring banks should ensure that application programming interface (API) requests to UPI should be monitored and moderated for appropriate use. This includes restricting  too many repeat APIs of the same or older transactions.

NPCI further said it has observed initiation of a high number of “check transaction status” APIs by PSP banks at a very high transactions per second (TPS).

API is a set of rules which allows different software systems to communicate with each other. In this case, PSP banks like Paytm, Google Pay and Phone Pe use these APIs to communicate with the UPI infrastructure, which helps the platforms to initiate, process and track transactions in real time. 

Over utilisation of these APIs can lead to slower time response, delay in transactions for all the users of that PSP and failure of transactions due to queue overflow. 

To curb this, NPCI has instructed the PSP banks that first check transaction status API should only be initiated 90 seconds after the original transaction took place. Besides, members may initiate the same 45 to 60 seconds ahead of the original transaction, after receiving revised communication from the retail payments body. 

The circular also highlighted that PSP/ acquiring banks can initiate a maximum of 3 check transaction status APIs, preferably within 2 hours from the initial transaction.

“Subsequently, in case Transaction ID  is not present or found in UPI System within first two 2 hours from initiation of the original transaction, then PSP banks / Acquiring banks shall refer the NPCI settlement files (available to Payee, Payer or PSP banks) after the settlement cycle is completed,” the circular said.

“Alternatively members may initiate a maximum of one check transaction s UDIR (Unified Dispute and Issue Resolution) which in turn checks URCS (UPI Backoffice) to fetch the final settlement status of the transaction,” it added.

NPCI also instructed PSP banks to audit their systems by “Cert-in empanelled auditor” on an immediate basis.

Besides, the authority is also looking to implement rate limiters on select UPI APIs. NPCI has instructed the banks to implement the above mentioned guidelines with immediate effect.

Recent UPI Failures

This comes close to homegrown UPI facing several outages in the past few months. On April 12 (Saturday), more than 2,387 users flagged issues regarding UPI failure.

Later, NPCI held a meeting with major banks and UPI apps to discuss recent outages in the system. During the meeting, NPCI urged banks and UPI players to be cautious when commenting publicly on the outages.

Yesterday, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman directed the NPCI to “reinforce” UPI’s robustness and prevent future disruptions. She encouraged the stakeholders to address and work on the infrastructure gaps in the UPI.