UPI faces outage, NPCI reports intermittent technical issues with network

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India’s real-time payments system Unified Payments Interface (UPI) faced an outage on Wednesday, leading to transaction failures across third-party apps and banking applications.

 

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body which operates the UPI rails, stated that the system faced intermittent technical issues leading to transaction failures.

 

“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 apex payments body said in a statement on social media platform X.

 

Third-party apps said that they raised the issue with NPCI after the initial outages were reported on their app.

 

“Nearly half of our verification for virtual payment addresses (VPA) saw a failure. Seemed like a network problem since transactions either failed or were categorised pending on our app,” a founder of a third-party UPI application said.

 

UPI recorded more than 580 million daily transactions on average in March.

 

UPI transactions saw a 5 per cent month-on-month dip in volume to 16.11 billion in February, from 16.99 billion in January, owing to fewer days in the month.

 

Similarly, the value also declined 6.5 per cent to Rs 21.48 trillion in February, compared to Rs 23.48 trillion in January.

 

This is compared to 16.73 billion in volume and Rs 23.25 trillion in value in December. However, this was a 33 per cent rise in volume and 20 per cent in value compared to February 2024, said data from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).