UPI Down Across India for Over 90 Minutes; Third Outage in 20 Days Leaves Users Frustrated
New Delhi, 12th April 2025: The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s most widely used digital payment system, experienced a nationwide outage today, leaving users unable to complete transactions for nearly one and a half hours. This marks the third disruption in just 20 days, raising concerns over the platform’s stability.
According to real-time outage monitoring platform DownDetector, the UPI service saw a surge in complaints between 11:30 am and 12:30 pm, with 72% of users reporting payment failures, 27% facing issues with fund transfers, and 1% experiencing difficulties in making purchases.
This latest glitch follows similar outages on April 2 and March 26, when users across the country were unable to transact via popular apps such as Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm. In those incidents, not only UPI but also net banking services of over 10 banks were affected, with some users unable to even log into their banking apps.
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates UPI, had earlier acknowledged these disruptions, attributing them to “temporary technical issues” and assured users that services had been restored and stabilized.
“Users have faced temporary technical problems, due to which UPI was partially interrupted. Now these problems have been resolved. The system has become stable,” NPCI had said after the March 26 outage.
UPI, which is regulated by the RBI but operated by NPCI, has been the backbone of India’s digital payment ecosystem. With over 10 billion transactions processed monthly, even short downtimes cause significant disruptions in daily life and business.
The government introduced a zero-charge framework for UPI transactions on January 1, 2020, which contributed to its mass adoption. UPI allows instant fund transfers using just a mobile number, virtual payment address, or Aadhaar-linked ID—eliminating the need to remember traditional banking details like account numbers or IFSC codes.
As of now, NPCI has not issued a fresh statement on today’s outage. Users continue to report intermittent failures in payments on social media platforms, urging authorities to improve infrastructure and transparency in such situations.
