A widespread technical glitch disrupted Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services across India on Saturday, affecting major digital payment platforms such as Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm. The outage, reported around noon, left thousands of users unable to complete transactions, creating chaos for both individuals and businesses. This marks the third major disruption in just 30 days, raising concerns over the reliability of India’s most widely used payment system.

According to outage monitoring site DownDetector, over 2,100 complaints were logged by 12:56 pm, with nearly 80% of users reporting transaction failures. Major banks like State Bank of India, HDFC Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, and Bank of Baroda were also impacted by the technical fault. Earlier in the day, over 1,100 complaints had already been filed, reflecting growing public frustration with repeated UPI service interruptions.

While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has not issued a detailed explanation, it recently made changes to international UPI usage—restricting QR code-based payments abroad from April 8 to improve user identification. QR transactions within India remain unaffected. Previous outages were reported on March 26 and April 2, with NPCI attributing the issues to intermittent technical faults that have since been resolved.