A widespread technical glitch disrupted Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions across India on Monday evening, marking the third major outage in less than a month. Users of leading digital payment platforms—including Google Pay, PhonePe, and Paytm—faced transaction failures, causing significant inconvenience for both consumers and businesses.

A surge in complaints on Downdetector reflected the scale of the disruption, while social media platforms were flooded with user reports detailing issues with digital payments. Many Paytm users encountered an error message reading: “UPI app is facing some issues.”

The outage comes amid a period of strong growth for UPI. In March, UPI transactions in India hit a record 18.30 billion, rebounding from a 5% dip in February, which saw 16.11 billion transactions. The total transaction value for March stood at ₹24.77 lakh crore, marking a 12.8% rise from February’s ₹21.96 lakh crore.

PhonePe maintained its leading position in the UPI space during March, processing 864.7 crore transactions—accounting for 47.25% of all UPI activity. Google Pay followed with a 36.04% share of transactions and 34.98% of the total transaction value.

Meanwhile, in a bid to promote digital payments among small vendors, the Indian government has approved a ₹1,500 crore incentive scheme aimed at encouraging low-value transactions via the BHIM-UPI platform.