UPI Services Face Disruption; Users Across India Unable to Process Payments
Unified Payments Interface (UPI) services encountered a disruption on Thursday, leaving users across India facing difficulties in carrying out payments.
Several users reported being unable to access UPI-based apps such as Google Pay, PhonePe, Paytm, and other major platforms for completing their transactions.
According to Downdetector, a service that monitors outages based on reports from multiple sources including user submissions, around 200 complaints had been recorded regarding the UPI disruption by 8:30 PM.
Nearly 80% of these complaints were related to issues during the payment process.
The glitch affected transactions through various major public and private sector banks, including HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Punjab National Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
Users React on Social Media
A large number of users took to X (formerly Twitter) to voice their concerns about being unable to make payments through mobile apps.
One user, Utkarsh Singh, posted, “UPI has been down for the past one hour without any prior notice of scheduled maintenance.”
Another person commented, “UPI has been down even before the time mentioned. The official website also went down before 11 PM on August 7!”
Understanding UPI
The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a digital payment system that allows users to link multiple bank accounts to a single mobile application, regardless of the bank. It facilitates various banking services, enables real-time money transfers, and supports merchant payments through a single unified platform.
India’s real-time payment system has become a global leader, surpassing Visa, as per a recent report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) titled Growing Retail Digital Payments: The Value of Interoperability. The IMF highlighted that UPI contributes to 85% of India’s digital transactions and around 60% of global real-time digital payments.
Currently, UPI handles more than 640 million transactions daily, the head of Visa noted in the report. In June 2025 alone, UPI processed Rs 24 lakh crore across 18.39 billion transactions, marking a 32% year-on-year increase compared to 13.88 billion transactions in June 2024.
