UPI overload: Is India’s digital payments backbone under pressure?

With three outages in just 30 days, India’s pride in the payments space—the now-ubiquitous Unified Payments Interface (UPI)—seems to be in a bit of a spot. Indeed, over the past year, there have been as many as six disruptions, an indication that the system may be stretched. While the National Payments Council of India (NPCI), which runs the system, did eventually fix the glitches, the inconvenience to users looking to transact cannot be brushed aside. The magnitude of the problem is evident from the fact that around 600 million transactions take place via UPI every day.