On Thursday, a major outage hit Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services across India, causing widespread inconvenience for users and forcing businesses to urgently seek backup payment solutions. Data from outage monitoring site Downdetector shows that 62% of users experienced difficulties making payments, 29% ran into trouble while transferring funds, and 8% reported app-related malfunctions.
Leading banks such as HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, and Kotak Mahindra Bank were impacted by the outage.
Following the outage, NPCI regretted the inconvenience caused to the customers. The statement reads, “Regret inconvenience on intermittent UPI connectivity issues as few of the banks were having some internal technical problems. NPCI systems have been working fine and we have worked with these banks to ensure quick resolution.”
Debit and Credit Cards Continue to Function Smoothly:
When UPI services are unavailable, your debit or credit card becomes the most reliable backup. Whether you’re swiping at a physical PoS terminal or entering your card details for online transactions, payments through Visa, RuPay, and Mastercard networks usually continue without any interruption.
UPI surpassed the 700 million mark, reaching a record 707 million:
For the first time ever, daily transactions made through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) have surpassed the 700 million mark, reaching a record 707 million.
According to the latest data published by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), this milestone was achieved on the 2nd of this month. Over the past two years, the volume of daily UPI transactions has doubled, although the total value of transactions has not grown as rapidly compared to earlier years.
This surge aligns with the Indian government’s ambitious target of hitting 1 billion (100 crore) UPI transactions per day, a goal that appears attainable by next year if the current pace continues.
In July alone, UPI processed approximately 19.5 billion payments amounting to more than Rs 25 lakh crore. UPI now facilitates around 85% of India’s digital payment activity and accounts for nearly half of all real-time digital transactions globally.
