1. A major disruption was seen in PhonePe’s UPI services from 7:30 pm on Monday.
The services of digital payments giant PhonePe were disrupted when the network capacity of their new data center could not withstand the sudden traffic pressure.
2. The company’s co-founder Rahul Chari gave information on X (formerly Twitter).
He said that, keeping in mind the Indo-Pak tension, the company had started a DR (Disaster Recovery) drill, under which all the traffic was routed to the new data center.
3. But the weakness of the network was exposed during peak hours.
Transactions suddenly started failing during the busy hours of Monday evening as the data center was unable to process the traffic properly.
4. PhonePe redirected the traffic to other servers.
The company took immediate action and sent the traffic to another data center and said that the services are slowly being resumed.
5. Users expressed their displeasure on X.
People complained that they were neither able to send money to anyone nor were they able to see the account details linked to the UPI ID.
6. Meanwhile, Paytm highlighted its reliability.
Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said that their UPI services are running normally and they are able to handle twice the normal number of transactions.
7. PhonePe processed 8.3 billion transactions in April 2025.
This Walmart-owned company has more than 45% share in the UPI market. In April, the entire UPI system handled more than 17 billion transactions.
8. UPI network outages have happened earlier also during the IPL season.
In March and April, there have been two major outages on NPCI’s network, which were caused by traffic spikes caused by gaming and betting apps.
9. NPCI’s report confirmed the load on the bank system.
It was found that many banks were repeatedly checking the transaction status from the backend, which put a heavy load on the network and slowed down the system.
10. Frequent outages raised concerns about the growing dependence on UPI.
PhonePe and Google Pay together control 75% of the UPI market, which has exposed the problem of “concentration risk,” i.e., excessive dependence in the system.
