Key takeaways
- PhonePe experienced a significant UPI outage due to a network capacity shortfall at a new data centre.
- The outage occurred during disaster recovery drills aimed at enhancing cybersecurity measures.
- Co-founder Rahul Chari attributed the failure to peak traffic overwhelming the new infrastructure.
- PhonePe is rebalancing traffic across sites and working to strengthen its systems.
- Competitor Paytm reported no issues, highlighting its UPI service's smooth operation amidst PhonePe's outage.
Phonepe, India’s digital payment platform, faced a significant UPI outage on Monday around 7:30 PM, due to a network capacity shortfall at the newly deployed data centre.
The incident occurred due to recovery drills initiated by Phonepe in response to escalating geopolitical tension. All traffic was routed through the new data centre as part of heightened cybersecurity measures. However, the infrastructure could not handle a high volume of transactions, leading to widespread failure, according to the company.
Rahul Chari, the co-founder and CTO of PhonePe, on X said, “Given the escalation of conflict last week, we at PhonePe initiated active disaster recovery drills with heightened cybersecurity measures on our network firewall. As part of this, 100% of our traffic was routed through a new data centre.”
“Unfortunately, the Monday evening peak traffic exposed a network capacity shortfall due to which transactions started failing.”
PhonePe apologised to the user, saying that they have now rebalanced their traffic across our sites and are seeing a recovery. They assured users that they will further strengthen the systems.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Founder of Paytm, took to the platform X to share that his payment platform is running smoothly and without errors. He said, “Just so you know, our UPI payments are working smoothly. The Paytm app is up and running at twice the regular speed.”
