UPI outage due to financial year-end transaction rush at banks, says NPCI

Transactions volumes declined 7 per cent on March 26 after the UPI network had reported an outage

Digital payment users on Tuesday encountered issues in processing transactions on India’s real-time payments system, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) attributing technical declines to financial year closing at the bank-end.

 

The financial year 2025 (FY25) ended on March 31, with the new financial year starting April 1.

 

“Today, due to the financial year closing, some of the banks are facing intermittent transaction declines. UPI system is working fine, and we are working with the concerned banks for necessary redressal,” the NPCI said in a statement.

 

NPCI runs the UPI network in the country.

 

Users are facing an outage while processing UPI transactions for the second time in less than a week. The network faced an outage last week, leading to transaction failures on the digital payments network.

 

In March, UPI recorded an average daily transaction volume of 591 million. The network recorded 550 million transactions on March 26 following an outage — a 7 per cent decline from the average daily transaction volume recorded in the same month. Over 581 million transactions were recorded on the previous day.

 

UPI transactions reached record highs in both value and volume in March 2025, clocking Rs 24.77 trillion and 19.78 billion transactions, respectively.

 

This marked a rise of 13 per cent in value and 14 per cent in volume over February, driven by a surge in year-end transactions, according to data from the NPCI.

 

This is the first time UPI value has crossed Rs 24 trillion and transactions have surpassed 19 billion since the system became operational in April 2016.

 

For the financial year 2024–25 (FY25), UPI transactions rose 30 per cent in value to Rs 260.56 trillion, up from Rs 199.96 trillion in FY24. Volume increased 42 per cent to 131.14 billion transactions compared with 92.48 billion in the previous year.

 

The March spike follows a decline in February, when transaction volume fell 5 per cent month-on-month to 16.11 billion from 16.99 billion in January, and value dropped 6.5 per cent to Rs 21.48 trillion from Rs 23.48 trillion in January.

 

On a year-on-year basis, the March 2025 numbers represent a 36 per cent rise in volume and a 25 per cent increase in value over March 2024. Daily transactions rose to 590 million from 575 million in February.