Millions of consumers were impacted by Saturday’s worldwide outage of digital payments via the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) service.

Bill payment, commercial transactions, and local shopping were all hampered by the disruption of digital services on a number of online payment systems.

By 1 pm, 2,358 complaints had been made, according to Down Detector, an outage monitoring software. The majority of issues were related to money transfers (17%) and payments (81%).

According to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs the UPI services, technical difficulties were the cause of the interruptions.

In a statement on social networking site X, the NPCI said, “NPCI is currently facing intermittent technical issues, leading to partial UPI transaction declines.”

“We’re working to fix the problem and will keep you informed.” We apologise for any inconvenience,” it continued.

A wider problem with the UPI network architecture was indicated by the fact that major banking applications including SBI, ICICI, and HDFC were all impacted.

“UPI is down once again. I’m glad I always have money with me. One impacted user said, “Cash is always King,” on X.

These days, this happens much too often. Another user said, “Banks declare their own ‘downtime’ for UPI transactions after UPI goes down first.”

According to the most recent NPCI statistics, the UPI transaction volume increased by 13.59 percent (month-over-month) from 16.11 billion in February to 18.3 billion in March.

UPI-based transactions reached a record Rs 24.77 lakh crore in March, up 12.79 percent from Rs 21.96 lakh crore in February.

According to NPCI statistics, the UPI network recorded an average of over 590 million transactions each day, totalling Rs 79,910 crore.

The record-breaking UPI transactions of Rs 24.77 lakh crore in March represented a remarkable 36% increase in volume and a 25% increase in value on an annual basis, highlighting the unstoppable pace of India’s digital payments revolution.

Both person-to-person (P2P) and person-to-merchant (P2M) payments increased significantly under UPI.