UPI Services Hit by Major Outage Again; Users Face Payment Failures on Google Pay, Paytm

Digital transactions were hit for the second time on Friday as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was hit by a massive outage, rendering payments on apps like Google Pay and Paytm impossible.

Twitter was full of users expressing outrage over failed payments and delays in transactions, especially on third-party applications.

The outage started at approximately 11:26 AM and was at its peak by 11:41 AM, when more than 222 users had reported the problem on DownDetector, which tracks real-time outages. 

As of noon, the grievances had grown to 1,168 — including 96 against Google Pay and 23 against Paytm, a report said.

While the number of complaints was increasing, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has not yet responded to or commented on the latest outage.

This is the sixth large UPI outage in the last one year. The biggest one happened on 26 March, when a technical glitch froze UPI services for almost three hours, affecting both consumers as well as merchants.

Earlier this week, on April 8, NPCI had also put out a notice restricting usage of QR codes for cross-border UPI transactions due to the requirement for improved payer identification. Domestic UPI QR payments are not impacted by this change.