Users of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) digital payment service, faced yet another disruption on the morning of April 12, 2025 leaving many stranded midway during their online transactions. This is the third time UPI services have snagged in the past few weeks.
UPI is among India’s most widely-used digital payment service, and such disruption affects many people, both buyers and merchants, who rely on UPI services for small and big online transactions.
The reason behind this disruption is not known yet. However, the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), the innovator of UPI, informed the users of this snag in a post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter).
“NPCI is currently facing intermittent technical issues, leading to partial UPI transaction declines. We are working to resolve the issue, and will keep you updated. We regret the inconvenience caused,” it said.
According to a report by DownDetector, the issue is quite major wherein approximately 1,168 complaints were logged by users this afternoon. Two key online transaction applications namely Google Pay and Paytm saw users registering 96 and 23 complaints, respectively.
Money transfers in India have seen a massive shift to the ‘online mode’ which is typically smoother and more efficient than carrying around cash.
UPI Snags in the Past
UPI has faced many outages in the past few weeks causing inconvenience to its users across the country.
The first major disruption happened on March 26, 2025 across the majority of UPI applications such as Paytm, PhonePay, etc. During this snag over 3,000 complaints were reported on DownDetector and the outage lasted for around 2-3 hours.
The second snag hit the users on April 2, 2025 wherein only 514 complaints were reported on DownDetector. Around 52 per cent of UPI users complained of facing issues while transferring funds through online UPI payment apps.
During the second outage, NPCI had said that UPI services were facing some intermittent declines due to ‘fluctuations’ in the success rates in some banks. These fluctuations, it noted, resulted in increased latency in the UPI network.
Any disruption to the UPI services hits thousands of users across India leading to payment and transaction failures at critical moments. The disruption on Saturday marked the third such outage in the past 20 days.