PhonePe Users’ Suffer UPI Outage During Disaster Recovery Drill; Here’s What Happened

PhonePe witnessed an outage in processing Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions on May 12. The fintech giant suffered an outage because of a network capacity shortfall driven by cybersecurity drills carried out due to escalating tensions between India and Pakistan. 

The UPI transactions via PhonePe were affected for nearly an hour on Monday evening, the Business Standard reported, citing an industry stakeholder and users. 

The Bengaluru-headquartered fintech company started disaster recovery (DR) drills to test cybersecurity measures on its network firewall, running all its transactions via a new data centre. However, due to network capacity shortfall, PhonePe began experiencing outage and users' transactions via its platform failed. 

“Given the escalation of the conflict last week, at PhonePe we initiated active DR drills, with heightened cybersecurity measures on our network firewall. This evening, 100% of our traffic across all our services was being served via a new data centre. Unfortunately, the Monday evening peak traffic exposed a network capacity shortfall due to which transactions started failing,” said PhonePe co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO), Rahul Chari, according to BS.

While the outage was experienced by users processing transactions via PhonePe, other UPI platform users didn’t experience such issues. Amid all this, the founder of Paytm, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, in a post on social media platform X, said the company’s fintech platform was functioning smoothly and processed double the regular volume of transactions. 

“Just so you know, our UPI payments are working smoothly. The Paytm app is up and running. 2x of regular volume,” said the Paytm founder. 

The outage witnessed by users of UPI platforms is not new, given its increased frequency in the last two months. To reduce such disruptions and ensure a smooth flow of transactions, the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) issued two circulars providing guidelines for the same.