UPI outages: RBI, govt monitoring situation

"Any existing limits on the number of API calls made for transaction status checks are not enforced since the ecosystem works with trusted partners.

- 

If the ecosystem can define it to three per transaction, it should solve the problem," said the participant.

A typical UPI transaction takes 10 digital "hops" to complete — an intricate choreography involving multiple stakeholders, including the payer's PSP banks (such as HDFC Bank, SBI, Axis Bank, and ICICI Bank), payee PSPs, remitter banks, beneficiary banks, and NPCI itself.

Once funds are debited from a remitter bank and credited to a beneficiary bank, the respective transaction statuses are returned at designated points along this digital route.

Sources indicated that this constant, rapid-fire exchange of API calls may have overwhelmed the UPI network, particularly if one server within this complex ecosystem experienced downtime. In such cases, the system's continuous attempts to retrieve transaction statuses can itself trigger a cascading effect, resulting in outages.