PhonePe suffers UPI outage after conducting disaster recovery drills

PhonePe's UPI services went down for over an hour on Monday evening as peak traffic exposed a network capacity shortfall during cybersecurity preparedness drills

Fintech major PhonePe suffered an outage in processing Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions on Monday due to a network capacity shortfall triggered during cybersecurity drills conducted in the wake of the India–Pakistan conflict.

 

Services of India’s real-time payments system, UPI, were disrupted on the PhonePe application for over an hour on Monday evening, users and industry stakeholders said.

 

The disruption occurred after the Bengaluru-based company initiated disaster recovery (DR) drills, processing all its transactions through a new data centre. A higher volume of UPI transactions on Monday evening exposed a network capacity shortfall, leading to transaction failures.

 

The drills were conducted to test cybersecurity measures on its network firewall.

 

“Given the escalation of the conflict last week, at PhonePe we initiated active DR drills, with heightened cybersecurity measures on our network firewall. This evening, 100 per cent of our traffic across all our services was being served through a new data centre. Unfortunately, the Monday evening peak traffic exposed a network capacity shortfall due to which transactions started failing,” said Rahul Chari, co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), PhonePe.

 

These active drills followed the India–Pakistan conflict. Such instances require enhanced cybersecurity measures to ensure smooth functioning of the payments network.

 

A senior industry executive added that the UPI network itself did not face any outage and that the disruption was limited to PhonePe.

 

Meanwhile, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, in a post on social media platform X, said that the Noida-based company’s application was functioning smoothly on Monday, processing twice the regular volume of transactions.

 

“Just so you know, our UPI payments are working smoothly. Paytm app is up and running. 2x of regular volume,” Sharma added.

 

In recent weeks, users faced four outages in processing UPI transactions in March and April.

 

Last month, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) issued two circulars providing guidelines on application programming interfaces (APIs) aimed at reducing such disruptions.

 

One of the circulars focuses on reducing the response time for four APIs, while the second outlines directions to prevent the misuse of APIs associated with real-time payments.

 

NPCI is the apex retail payments body that operates UPI in India.