'Cash is always King': Nationwide UPI Outage Disrupts Digital Payments

New Delhi

On Saturday, digital payments across India using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) were hit by a major outage. Millions of people faced issues while trying to pay bills, shop, or transfer money. 

The problem affected several popular banking apps like SBI, ICICI, and HDFC. According to the platform Down Detector, over 2,300 complaints were reported by 1 pm. around 81% of these were related to payment failures, and 17% involved issues with fund transfers. 

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs UPI, said the issue was caused by technical problems. In a post on social media, NPCI said they were working to fix the glitch and apologized for the inconvenience. 

Users on social media shared their frustration. One wrote, “UPI is down again. Good that I always carry cash.” 

Laughing at the Indian online payment system, one user wrote on X: "#UPIDown again. So strange!! This is becoming way too frequent nowadays. First #UPI goes down, then banks declare their own “downtime” for UPI transactions. India ka online payment s...

Despite this issue, UPI use has been growing. In March alone, 18.3 billion transactions were made, worth ₹24.77 lakh crore—marking big jumps compared to February.