UPI outage disrupts digital payments nationwide, users vent online

India’s real-time payment backbone—the Unified Payments Interface (UPI)—suffered a widespread outage on Saturday, leaving users across the country unable to initiate payments or transfer funds. The disruption paralysed transactions for many small businesses and individuals who rely on the platform for everyday payments.

Chirag Barjatya, a fitness entrepreneur, voiced his frustration on X (formerly Twitter), highlighting the deeper problem of growing digital dependency in a country moving away from cash.

“I was so proud of UPI as a system. But this one downtime has broken that pride a bit—not fully, but a bit. The problem is that even ATMs are getting fewer and fewer day by day. I don’t even know where my debit card is, and the habit of keeping cash has diminished completely.”— @chiragbarjatyaa

The outage triggered a storm of complaints on social media, with users reporting being stranded at petrol pumps and local shops as transactions failed to process. Some called for prior notifications to be made mandatory for service disruptions, especially on platforms as widely used as UPI.

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“Got stuck at a petrol pump today because UPI was down and I don’t carry cash. Had to wait for a friend to arrive with money. Can we please have alerts before planned maintenance or some backup?” -@innocentBruh

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An educator shared a screenshot showing failed transactions across multiple bank accounts—underscoring that the impact wasn’t restricted to one or two providers.“Not a single UPI app working. Axis, HDFC, SBI—all throwing errors. This is serious.” – @Sheetal2242

While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) had not issued an official statement at the time of publication, downtime was observed across popular apps such as PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm.

This is the third such disruption in a week, amplifying concerns over UPI’s robustness as it becomes increasingly critical to India’s cash-lite economy.

Despite these setbacks, UPI continues to post record transaction volumes. As per NPCI data, the platform processed more than 13 billion transactions in March 2025. However, industry insiders say the earlier hyper-growth is now plateauing as urban markets mature and new users come from lower-tier cities and semi-urban areas.

The repeated outages are sparking calls for a more resilient infrastructure and better communication protocols during downtimes.