UPI outage disrupts digital payments nationwide, users vent online

India’s real-time cost spine—the Unified Funds Interface (UPI)—suffered a widespread outage on Saturday, leaving customers throughout the nation unable to provoke funds or switch funds. The disruption paralysed transactions for a lot of small companies and people who depend on the platform for on a regular basis funds.

Chirag Barjatya, a health entrepreneur, voiced his frustration on X (previously Twitter), highlighting the deeper drawback of rising digital dependency in a rustic transferring away from money.

“I used to be so happy with UPI as a system. However this one downtime has damaged that pleasure a bit—not absolutely, however a bit. The issue is that even ATMs are getting fewer and fewer day-to-day. I don’t even know the place my debit card is, and the behavior of protecting money has diminished fully.”— @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. That is critical.” – @Sheetal2242

While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) had not issued an official assertion on the time of publication, downtime was noticed throughout common apps reminiscent of 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.

Regardless of these setbacks, UPI continues to publish report transaction volumes. As per NPCI knowledge, the platform processed greater than 13 billion transactions in March 2025. Nevertheless, business insiders say the sooner hyper-growth is now plateauing as city markets mature and new customers come from lower-tier cities and semi-urban areas.

The repeated outages are sparking requires a extra resilient infrastructure and higher communication protocols throughout downtimes.