UPI is down again: Third time this week – what is happening|

Today morning on Saturday, India’s UPI (Unified Payments Interface) system faced another big problem. People were neither able to send digital money, nor receive it from anyone. This is the third time in the last 1 month when UPI has failed so much.

Everyone is worried – from users to businesses

Be it small shops or users sending money online – everyone is facing difficulties. Nowadays in India every other transaction happens through UPI, so when the system goes down, the impact is huge.

What do the numbers say?

By afternoon, 1,168 complaints had been logged. 96 people reported problems on Google Pay. 23 complaints were also received on Paytm. But it is not yet clear what the problem was exactly – technical glitch, server down or something else.

Official statement of NPCI

NPCI (National Payment Corporation of India) which handles UPI said: “Currently, we’re facing intermittent technical issues. Due to this some UPI transactions are failing. We are working to resolve this problem. We are ready for inconvenience.”

This is not happening for the first time…

This is just the latest case. This is the third time in the last few days that UPI users have faced problems:

1 April 2: 514 complaints were reported and 52% people were not able to transfer funds. NPCI said there was a “fluctuation” in the success rates of the bank.

2 March 26: 3,000+ complaints were received and Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm were all affected. Service was down for 2-3 hours.

Is people’s trust being shaken?

UPI has made our daily payments system very easy – be it Rs 10 for tea or Rs 10,000 for rent, everything is done with a single tap. But now the repeated glitches are affecting people’s trust.

So what should we do now?

Now users need to be patient and should use alternate options like net banking, card payments. But repeated failure of a national level digital system is definitely a serious concern.