UPI Glitch Hits Millions: Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay Services Back After Peak Hour Disruption

UPI (Unified Payments Interface) services on key digital payment platforms such as Paytm, PhonePe, and Google Pay have been restored after a large disruption on Monday evening at 7 p.m.The problem prevented millions of users across India from completing transactions, causing significant inconvenience, particularly during peak hours.

This is the third such event in less than a month, raising new concerns about the stability and dependability of digital payment systems, which have become an essential aspect of daily life.While the actual reason of the problem was unknown at first, stories of failed or delayed payments began to circulate on social media. Downdetector, a platform that monitors service interruptions, detected an immense spike in outage reports for all three apps around the same time.

PhonePe later released a comment on X (previously Twitter), saying that the problem was caused by their ongoing disaster recovery (DR) drills and enhanced cybersecurity procedures. According to the firm, all traffic was routed through a new data centre, which was unable to handle the unexpected increase in evening transactions, resulting in unsuccessful payments.They have since rebalanced the load among other servers and confirmed that services are restored.

However, Paytm first maintained that their services were operating normally, despite customer reports of problems.Google Pay users reported similar transaction delays and failures.

The problem occurs at a time when UPI usage in India is smashing records. In March, around 18.3 billion UPI transactions were processed, totalling ₹24.77 lakh crore. PhonePe top the rankings, accounting for roughly half of all UPI traffic, followed by Google Pay and Paytm.

The Indian government is boosting UPI usage among small merchants and has launched a ₹1,500 crore incentive scheme to encourage use of the BHIM app ecosystem.This latest failure underlines the critical need to upgrade backend infrastructure to keep up with the tremendous expansion in digital payment usage.