UPI Faced a Crash This Weekend—Here’s Why It Happened

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) faced an outage on April 12 due to a sudden spike in traffic, according to the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). This was the fourth such disruption in three weeks.

NPCI’s analysis found that some banks and merchants sent more transaction confirmation requests than allowed, overwhelming the system and causing downtime.

The issue was linked to excessive use of the “Check Transaction” API, a tool that lets banks verify the status of payments.

Certain banks kept sending repeated requests—including for older transactions—without waiting for a response. This created a backlog and slowed down the system.

To fix the issue, NPCI asked the main bank responsible to stop using the API temporarily.

Looking ahead, NPCI will enforce stricter rate limits, which are technical controls that cap how often banks can make requests to UPI. These limits are meant to prevent overload.