Pawan Rawat
Over the past weekend, millions of Indians experienced unexpected delays and failures while making digital payments through UPI (Unified Payments Interface). With UPI being a crucial part of India’s digital payment infrastructure, even a few hours of downtime can lead to widespread confusion and concern. Here’s a look at what caused the disruption, how it was resolved, and what it means for the future of digital payments in India.
What Happened?
On April 12, 2025, users across multiple platforms, including popular apps like PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm, reported issues with UPI transactions. Payments were either getting delayed or failing altogether. According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates the UPI system, the disruption lasted for several hours—peaking in the afternoon.
During the worst of the outage, the success rate of UPI transactions reportedly dropped to around 50%, significantly below the typical near-perfect success rates users have come to expect.
The Root Cause
The glitch wasn’t due to a system breakdown or cyberattack—it stemmed from a surge in “Check Transaction Status” API requests. These are backend queries that banks and payment service providers (PSPs) send to verify if a transaction has gone through, especially in cases where the receiving bank doesn’t immediately respond.
Over the weekend, several PSP banks began sending these check requests excessively—even for older transactions—and failed to wait for proper responses before resending them. This constant back-and-forth led to system congestion, putting undue stress on the UPI backend and affecting transaction processing for everyone.
NPCI’s Response and Fix
NPCI acted quickly once the issue was identified. They communicated directly with the involved banks and partners, urging them to follow standard protocol—specifically, to avoid sending transaction status queries more than once every 90 seconds. Additionally, they recommended relying on scheduled data files (updated every two hours) to confirm pending transaction statuses instead of bombarding the live system with repeated checks.
By 4:40 PM the same day, UPI services had largely returned to normal.
Why It Matters
While the issue was resolved in a matter of hours, the incident serves as a critical reminder of the growing dependency on real-time digital payments in India. With UPI facilitating over 10 billion transactions a month, even a minor technical hiccup can affect millions of users and businesses.
This outage also highlights the need for tighter compliance, better load management, and more robust contingency planning among all UPI participants—including banks, third-party apps, and service providers.
What’s Next?
To prevent similar incidents in the future, NPCI is expected to roll out stricter API usage guidelines and possibly introduce automated throttling mechanisms to prevent overuse of sensitive system functions. Banks and PSPs may also need to invest in better infrastructure monitoring and smarter load balancing to handle peak traffic.
As India continues to lead the world in digital payment adoption, ensuring the resilience and reliability of systems like UPI is not just a technical issue—it’s an economic imperative.
Conclusion
The brief UPI outage over the weekend was a wake-up call for all stakeholders in India’s digital finance ecosystem. While the cause was more procedural than systemic, it revealed how quickly small backend issues can scale into national disruptions. With proactive steps from NPCI and cooperation from banks and payment apps, the goal remains clear: to keep UPI smooth, secure, and always available for the billions who rely on it every day.
