PhonePe Hit By Tech Outage, Blames Network Capacity Shortfall

SUMMARY

PhonePe said that it has rebalanced its traffic across its other sites and is witnessing recovery in its UPI system

Paytm CEO has said that the company’s app is working smoothly and is clocking 2X of regular volume

This comes at a time when UPI has faced several outages in the past few months

Fintech major PhonePe today suffered a major tech outage, leaving many users unable to make digital payments.

As per tracking platform DownDetector, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) ecosystem was hit by an outage at around 5:58 PM. The matter peaked at 7:13 PM when 906 users reported problems with the digital payments service.

While the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has not issued any statement on the outage so far, PhonePe said that the outage was due to its internal issues.

In a post on X, PhonePe cofounder and chief technology officer (CTO) Rahul Chari attributed the outage to a network capacity shortfall, which led to transaction failure.

“… This evening, 100% of our traffic across all our services was being served through a new data center. Unfortunately, the Monday evening peak traffic exposed a network capacity shortfall due to which transactions started failing. We have now rebalanced our traffic across our other sites and are seeing the recovery. Our apologies for this. We assure to take these learnings and further strengthen our systems,” said Chari.

Meanwhile, users reported that they faced problems in making payments via Google Pay. However, Paytm said it didn’t face any outage.

“Just so you know, our UPI payments are working smoothly. Paytm app is up and running. 2X of regular volume,” said Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma on X.

This comes at a time when UPI has faced several outages in the past few months.

On April 12, online payments were hit due to a widespread UPI outage across the country. At the time, the NPCI attributed the glitch to intermittent technical issues but, later on, directed banks and fintech apps to monitor and moderate application programming interface (API) requests to UPI for “appropriate use”.

Prior to this, UPI was down on April 2 due to “increased latency” in the network and another one on March 26 due to “intermittent technical issues”.

Such has been the scale of disruption that finance minister (FM) Nirmala Sitharaman last month directed the NPCI to “reinforce” UPI’s robustness and prevent any future disruptions.

Despite the hiccups, UPI transactions in the country continue to grow exponentially. In April, the number of transactions stood at 1,780 Cr.