UPI Outage: Mobile Payments Suffer As Banks Face Technical Issues

If you were trying to make UPI payments from your phone on Tuesday evening and got a payment failure alert, you’re not alone. The body operating UPI through multiple banks in the country confirmed the digital payment system faced outage because of technical issues at the banks end which forced the servers down. The problem was faced by people in major cities like Delhi-NCR, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru and even Jaipur.

The development was further proven by the readings on Downdetector platform where the UPI outages report peaked between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM on Tuesday. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) also shared an update via its post on X which said,

UPI is used for mobile payments through apps like Paytm, Google Pay, PhonePe and even some of the banking apps. But most of the UPI payments are processed through banks like HDFC Bank, ICICI and Axis among others. UPI outage can mostly be attributed to issues at either of these banks, and NPCI’s statement earlier on Tuesday confirms our doubts without actually naming the concerned entities.

And if that isn’t enough, you will notice people sharing their displeasure with the UPI outage on social media, especially those who didn’t have any cash in their wallet and were stuck with the payment servers not going through.

UPI continues to rake in big numbers and many people have stopped using or even carrying cash because of how ubiquitous UPI payments have become across the country in the past few years. So, when an event like this occurs, and UPI servers of banks go down, people are bound to face issues while they are shopping or out to grab a meal.