UPI overhaul to prevent outages

Know what's changing from August 1, and what it means for you

- REWATI KARAN

India's GO-TO-PAYMENTS platform, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), is getting a major technical overhaul from August 1. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which operates UPI, has announced new Application Programming Interfaces (API) usage rules aimed at preventing the system from buckling under its own weight. These changes, while mostly invisible to users, will directly impact how often and when certain UPI functions like balance checks and autopay mandates can be used.

India's UPI system, which processes over 16 billion transactions monthly as per NPCI's UPI ecosystem statistics, has become a digital backbone. As of May 2025, it registered over 18 billion transactions and the value exceeded ₹25.14 lakh crore. But as the system scales, the challenges of load balancing, system abuse and technical fragility are also scaling.

Recent outages have been a turning point, the most notable being a five-hour disruption on April 12, the longest in over three years. This resulted in a circular from NPC: "PSP banks and/or acquiring banks shall ensure all the API requests (in terms of velocity and TPS - transactions per second limitations) sent to UPI are monitored and moderated in terms of appropriate usage (customer-initiated and PSP system-initiated)."

Why now

UPI is the country's most preferred digital payment method, and it processes about 7,000 transactions in a second. So when UPI is down even for a minute, it can roughly impact four lakh people and for ten minutes, the impact could be 40 lakh transactions.