NPCI meets banks, UPI apps to discuss recent outages on the platform

Sources also said that NPCI informed banks that it will be sharing a detailed to-do list, outlining specific actions that need to be implemented to strengthen the UPI ecosystem

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates the country’s flagship payments platform Unified Payments Interface (UPI), held a meeting with major banks and third-party application providers (TPAPs) on Tuesday to discuss the recent outages on the platform, according to sources aware of the development. These disruptions, which occurred within a span of three weeks, have raised concerns among customers and caused inconvenience to them.

  According to sources, the NPCI informed banks and TPAPs about the recent outages and said it was conducting a “root cause analysis” of April 12 outage, which was expected to be completed this week.

  Additionally, the NPCI assured participants that it is taking necessary steps to minimise such disruptions, and urged banks to do the same to ensure smooth functioning of the UPI system. 

Sources also said that the NPCI told banks that it will be sharing a detailed “to-do” list, outlining specific actions that need to be implemented to strengthen the UPI ecosystem and reduce the likelihood of future outages.

  Banks present included State Bank of India (SBI), HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, and Yes Bank, among others. PhonePe and Google Pay were also part of the meeting, according to sources.

 

“Today's meeting focused on challenges that banks are facing in operations of UPI-related infrastructure. The root cause analysis by NPCI is still underway and expected to be completed this week”, said a senior public sector bank (PSB) executive aware of the proceedings of the meeting. He added that with millions of small transactions, long-duration outages have caused hardships and that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and many arms of the government are monitoring.

  “The NPCI board is yet to have any meeting but many directors, who are serving bankers, are in the loop”, he said. The UPI ecosystem faced an outage on March 26, followed by March 31, April 2, and April 12.

  The NPCI, on its X account, clarified that on March 26 it faced intermittent technical issues due to which UPI had partial declines. On April 1, it said that due to the financial year closing, some of the banks faced intermittent transaction declines but the UPI system was working fine. 

On April 2, the NPCI clarified that there were intermittent declines in UPI due to fluctuations in the success rates in some banks, which increased the latency in UPI network. Lastly, on April 12, the NPCI said they faced intermittent technical issues, leading to partial UPI transaction declines.

  Business Standard has reported previously that network disruptions caused by internet service providers (ISPs) powering UPI, hardware malfunctions, and the overloading of banks’ transaction processing systems were likely behind the UPI outages on March 26 and April 2.

  Telecommunications (telecom) network fluctuations were likely to have disrupted UPI services on March 26, leaving users across the country unable to process transactions on both banking and third-party UPI applications for over an hour. A separate technical glitch affecting the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) was likely to have led to another outage on April 2.

  The outages occurred even as UPI hit new peaks in transaction volumes. In March 2025, UPI processed a record ₹24.77 trillion across 19.78 billion transactions. This is the first time UPI’s monthly transaction value has crossed ₹24 trillion and volume has exceeded 19 billion since its launch in April 2016. 

For the financial year 2024-25 (FY25), UPI transaction value rose 30 per cent to ₹260.56 trillion, up from ₹199.96 trillion in FY24. Transaction volume grew 42 per cent to 131.14 billion, compared with 92.48 billion in FY24.