'Cleaned vessels at restaurant': UPI down in India, netizens up their meme game

The system faced temporary issue for about an hour or so and it was subsequently stabilised by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

Imagine this, you're at a restaurant, you have had your food and have the bill in front of you. You scan the QR code, and you see the digital payment app is down. Pure embarassent.

This is exactly what happened on Wednesday when people across India reported a UPI (Unified Payments Interface) outage. The outage triggered a surge in complaints on Downdetector, a platform that monitors service disruptions based on user reports.

The system faced a temporary issue for about an hour or so, and it was subsequently stabilised by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

"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," the payment regulator said in a post on X.

However, it did not stop the netizens from posting memes related to the situation. Social media was flooded with memes, which many found to be relatable. People shared how they were in the middle of making a payment and could not do so as their UPI stopped working. Netizens cracked jokes on how they had to clean vessels at the restaurant as they could not pay the bill. Some even noted how useful it is to keep cash handy.

Let us take a look at some of the memes shared on social media:

A user's post highlighted the importance of carrying cash and said how elders were right about carrying cash. Here are some other memes that are sure to crack you up.

A user posted that many people in India rely on UPI on daily basis and a glitch like this one could stall small businesses and disrupt cashless payments.

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is an instant payment system developed and managed by the NPCI, an RBI-regulated entity.

UPI is built over the IMPS infrastructure and allows you to instantly transfer money between any two parties' bank accounts.

UPI transactions in January surpassed 16.99 billion, and the value exceeded Rs 23.48 lakh crore, marking the highest number recorded in any month.

For 2023-24, the digital payments landscape has demonstrated remarkable expansion, the finance ministry had said in a statement.

Unified Payments Interface (UPI) remains the cornerstone of India's digital payment ecosystem, contributing to 80 per cent of the retail payments across the country, it said.

The total transaction volume exceeded 131 billion and the value exceeded Rs 200 lakh crore for the 2023-24.

(With PTI inputs)