UPI server faces outage, complaints flooded on Twitter about failed payments

New Delhi: The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) server has been down for more than an hour, forcing payments across the country to be disrupted.

Users flocked to Twitter to express their dissatisfaction with the failure of major UPI apps such as PhonePe, Google Pay, and Paytm to execute transactions. After extensive processing delays, users were advised of failed payments.

The UPI server has gone down twice this year, the most recent instance being on January 9. The NPCI is yet to publish a public statement or tweet about the outage.

UPI, the National Payments Corporation of India's (NPCI) real-time payment system, accounts for more than 60% of India's retail transactions.

The payments system processes a large number of transactions, the majority of which are low-value. The volume of UPI transactions below Rs 100 accounts for 75% of the total.

UPI processed 540 crore transactions worth Rs 9.60 lakh crore in the month of March alone.

Meanwhile, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is working on facilitating payments in the offline mode to lessen the pressure on bank and in-house systems.