Context:
Unified Payments Interface (UPI), India’s real-time payment system, experienced 995 minutes of downtime from March 2020 to March 2025, spanning over 17 incidents. These outages were attributed to intermittent technical issues by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).
Key Details
1. UPI Downtime Statistics
- The downtime from March 2020 to March 2025 amounted to 995 minutes.
- If April’s outages are included, the downtime is estimated to have exceeded 1,000 minutes.
- The longest outage occurred in July 2024, lasting 207 minutes.
- Despite these incidents, UPI uptime has exceeded 99% each month, indicating high functionality.
2. Causes of Outages
- The recent outages have been linked to network disruptions by internet service providers (ISPs), hardware malfunctions, and overloaded transaction-processing systems of banks.
- An hour-long outage can affect around 40 million UPI transactions.
- The outages have occurred on high-traffic days, such as March 26, where UPI processed 550 million transactions, a 7% decline from the previous day.
3. Market Share of UPI Players
- UPI has seen a duopoly in its market, dominated by PhonePe and Google Pay.
- PhonePe holds 47.25% of the market share, followed by Google Pay with 36.04%.
- Together, these two platforms account for 83% of the UPI transaction volume.
Despite frequent technical glitches, UPI maintains a high level of functionality. The dominance of PhonePe and Google Pay has raised concerns about the market concentration within India’s digital payments ecosystem. These outages, while infrequent, highlight challenges in the scalability and resilience of the infrastructure supporting UPI.
