Bhopal: UPI services go phut, consumers in trouble

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): The services of Unified Payment Interface (UPI), the instant payment interface developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), went on the blink on Sunday lamming the consumers in Bhopal.

The UPI has become one of the most common payment methods, especially for the young-adult generation, and the situation brought several transactions to halt, said the Bhopalites Free Press talked to.

'I had an order delivered at my home from Amazon and I was not able to pay for the same. Both the delivery assistant and I were extremely confused as to what to do next since I did not have a single penny in cash,' said a 22-year-old engineering student Tanveer Saini.

'We tried for about half an hour, paying to at least seven different GooglePay accounts but to no avail. Ultimately, he returned without handing me my order,' he added.

A class 6-10 coaching director, Neeraj Yadav, said, 'The last date to pay the fees of my institute is 10th of every month. I received several calls from my students and their parents about how the UPI app said, 'recipient's bank server down' and they were not able to send the fee amount. I had no idea what had happened.'

'I then opened Twitter to find there were similar complaints from several people. Then I realised, UPI was the problem,' he added.

A shopkeeper in the New Market area, Pratibimb Kriplani, said, 'I had to face a huge loss in business as most of the young customers chose to pay through UPI and do not carry cash. When they found that UPI was not working, they went back regretting not carrying cash.'

The services were restored after 6 pm, following a brief outage on Sunday, said the NPCI through social media. They further said the services had gone down due to an 'intermittent technical glitch'.

Several users too had taken to Twitter to report that the UPI server was down and†they were not being able to make any transactions using digital wallets and online payment platforms such as Google Pay and Paytm.