India’s Payment Lifeline Tested: UPI Outages Spur NPCI’s Mission for Unbreakable Infrastructure

Unknown Apr 02, 2026 750 Views

India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is under record stress, with four significant outages in the last three weeks—ending in a five-hour outage on April 12, the longest in more than three years. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which runs UPI, has identified the cause as banks clogging the system with an excessive number of transaction status check requests, overloading the core infrastructure of the platform.

Key Highlights:

API Overload Triggers Outages: Recent outages were due to banks pinging the 'Check Transaction' API repeatedly—occasionally for older transactions and not waiting for returns—leading to a self-crafted denial-of-service situation. This caused sudden declines in UPI success rates, impacting major apps such as Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm.

Lack of Central Controls: Although NPCI guidelines limit banks to three status checks per transaction (spaced 90 seconds apart), enforcement was left to individual banks. This gap allowed unchecked API traffic to flood the system, exposing a critical flaw in UPI’s resilience.

NPCI’s New Monitoring Mechanism: In response, NPCI is developing a central API monitoring and rate-limiting system to track and control transaction status requests in real time. This will include stricter enforcement of call limits and the ability to block systems abusing the network architecture.

Emergency Collaboration: NPCI has convened urgent meetings with top payment service provider (PSP) banks and is reiterating API usage guidelines. Banks are now advised to rely on NPCI’s raw data files for transaction status instead of repeated API calls.

Surging Volumes Add Pressure: UPI processed a record ₹24.77 trillion across 19.78 billion transactions in March 2025 alone, with FY25 totals up 30% by value and 42% by volume. Most transactions are micro-payments, intensifying the load on real-time systems.

As UPI cements its role as India’s digital payments backbone, NPCI’s move to implement robust API monitoring is seen as vital to ensuring reliability and scaling securely for the future.

Sources: Economic Times, Business Standard, Times of India, The420

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