A major technical issue had halted Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services all over India on Saturday morning, which was the third major disruption in the past 30 days. The issue impacted a number of financial institutions such as HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
As per DownDetector, a web application used for tracking outages, there were 2,147 complaints logged by 12:56 pm, and nearly 80% of customers found themselves struggling when making payments. In the morning, as much as 1,168 complaints had been recorded, illustrating prevalent anger.
This disruption comes after a March 26 UPI outage that impacted digital transactions as well. Then, NPCI had accepted intermittent technical glitches that led to partial declines in the system. “NPCI had experienced intermittent technical problems due to which UPI had partial decline. The same has been rectified now and the system has stabilized. Sorry for the inconvenience,” the payment regulator said on X.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday this week, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) revealed a policy revision for international UPI transactions. From April 8 onwards, QR code payments for non-India transactions are limited in an effort to enhance payer identification. However, Indian QR payments are not affected.
