UPI, the backbone of India's digital payments, has been facing repeated outages in recent days. In the last 18 days, the system has gone down four times, affecting millions of users. Now, NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) has revealed the real cause behind these disruptions and shared steps being taken to resolve the issue.
According to NPCI, some Payment Service Provider (PSP) banks were misusing the "Check Transaction" API. While this API is meant to check the status of transactions, certain banks were using it to repeatedly query old transactions without waiting for a response, creating a digital traffic jam on UPI servers.
On April 12, UPI remained down from 11:40 AM to 4:40 PM, causing widespread transaction failures on platforms like Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm. At 4:15 PM, NPCI implemented a temporary technical fix, which helped normalize the system within 25 minutes.
To avoid such outages in the future, NPCI is taking strict measures:
Stricter rate-limiters will be implemented to control the frequency of API requests.
All PSP banks will be re-trained on API usage guidelines.
Enhanced system monitoring will be enforced.
April 12 – 5-hour outage
April 2 – Issues reported around 7:40 PM
March 31 – Temporary service interruption
March 26 – UPI down for 2–3 hours
