UPI Outage: NPCI Restores Digital Payment Medium, Here Is An Alternative In Case Of Emergency

India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI), ​on March 26, 2025, at around 7:00 PM, witnessed a nationwide outage. This resulted in disruption of digital transactions for Indian citizens. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) addressed the issue, citing the "intermittent technical issues," and confirmed that the system has since stabilised.

"NPCI had faced intermittent technical issues, owing to which UPI had a partial decline. The same has been addressed now, and the system has stabilised. Regret the inconvenience," the payment regulator said in a post on X.

Downdetector, a platform monitoring online service disruptions, reported a surge of over 2,750 complaints related to UPI services by 7:50 PM. Specifically, there were 296 complaints concerning Google Pay, 119 for Paytm, and 376 regarding the State Bank of India (SBI) platform. SBI users primarily reported issues with fund transfers and online banking services.

Mainstream UPI apps, including Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm were impacted. While a few banks, such as ICICI Bank, remained functional, others like HDFC Bank saw disturbance.

Internet users were writing on social media to express their frustrations. One individual noted, "For the first time in my life, I've experienced UPI downtime. Not Banks, or gateways, but @UPI_NPCI itself, by the way, uptime was 100 per cent in February." Another user reported, "UPI not Working. My Money is debited but Not credited to my friend's account @UPI_NPCI."

Despite this disruption, UPI has grown significantly in India and globally. In January 2025, UPI transactions surpassed 16.99 billion, with a total value exceeding Rs 23.48 lakh crore, registering the highest figures recorded in any month. This showed UPI's role as a cornerstone of India's digital payment ecosystem, contributing to 80 per cent of retail payments nationwide. ​

As of January 2025, over 80 UPI apps and 641 banks are live on the UPI ecosystem, indicating its widespread adoption and integration across financial platforms.

Usually, cases of slow bank servers and network problems are some of the top reasons for UPI payment failures. To curb that, NPCI in September 2022 launched UPI Lite. An individual can pay up to Rs 2000 twice a day without needing to add a UPI PIN or be dependent on bank servers.