UPI Faces Third Outage in a Month; Users Report Failures on PhonePe, GPay, and Others

Evening disruption hits major UPI platforms across India, with users reporting failed transactions, fund transfer delays, and app crashes. NPCI yet to issue a statement.

New Delhi, May 12:
India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) network suffered another major outage on Monday evening, leaving users of PhonePe, Google Pay, and other payment platforms scrambling to complete transactions. This marks the third widespread UPI disruption in under a month.

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According to Downdetector, complaints began surging early in the evening, with over 500 reports logged — 80% of which related to fund transfer failures, followed by issues with app functionality and payment delays.

Users took to social media using the hashtag #UPIdown, sharing their frustration and, in some cases, humorous memes about failed payments at restaurants, fuel stations, and grocery stores. The glitch caused significant inconvenience to both consumers and merchants, particularly those who rely heavily on UPI for day-to-day transactions.

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While PhonePe and GPay users reported issues, Paytm stated that its services were operating normally, adding a layer of inconsistency to the disruption.

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which manages the UPI ecosystem, has not yet issued an official statement about the nature or cause of the failure. The repeated outages are beginning to raise questions about the resilience and scalability of India’s rapidly expanding digital payment infrastructure.

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UPI Growth Amid Instability

The latest outage comes after UPI hit a record 18.3 billion transactions in March, recovering from a brief 5% dip in February. The total transaction value for March also surged to ₹24.77 lakh crore, up from ₹21.96 lakh crore in February.

Despite this exponential growth, the frequency of outages in recent weeks is beginning to alarm both users and fintech experts, especially as UPI becomes the backbone of India’s digital economy.

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UPI outage, PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, digital payments, Downdetector, NPCI, fund transfer issues, UPI disruption, India fintech, online payments, GPay, payment failure,