'India's GDP can be at stake!': Shark Tank India judge Anupam Mittal slams NPCI as UPI glitches persist

Shark Tank India judge Anupam Mittal, founder of Shaadi.com, shared a post on X on Thursday, taking a jibe at the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) over the UPI outage in the country.

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) experienced a major outage for several hours on Wednesday evening, affecting platforms such as Google Pay and Paytm. UPI is an instant real-time payment system developed by NPCI that facilitates inter-bank peer-to-peer and person-to-merchant transactions.

On Wednesday evening, NPCI confirmed that the issue had occurred and stated that it had been resolved.

"NPCI had faced intermittent technical issues owing to which UPI had partial decline. The same has been addressed now, and the system has stabilised. Regret the inconvenience," said a post on X by NPCI.

Mittal, however, claimed that UPI payments were still not functioning smoothly even 24 hours after the outage.

"Digital payments via UPI continue to struggle after 24 hrs while we have media reporting it was down only for an hour. Increasingly, problem-solving is becoming problem-spinning," Mittal posted on X.

He urged NPCI to resolve the issue, adding, "(After all, the country’s GDP is at stake) Desh ke GDP ka sawaal hai."

https://x.com/AnupamMittal/status/1905151355561583076

Data from the website Downdetector revealed that at the peak of the outage at 7:43 PM on March 26, there was a surge in user reports, with as many as 3,200 individuals experiencing issues. The disruptions primarily affected payment transactions, accounting for 80% of complaints, while 15% of users faced difficulties with fund transfers, and 5% encountered app-related problems. The situation began improving around 9 PM, with reports declining rapidly. However, as of this morning, at least 20 user reports have still been registered.

The website states that it “only reports an incident when the number of problem reports is significantly higher than the typical volume for that time of day.”

This suggests that Mittal's claim is valid—users continue to face issues with UPI transactions.

In addition to UPI, Downdetector also reported significant data outages for Jio and Airtel users, according to the website operated by Ookla, a subsidiary of Ziff Davis.