Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The National Payments Corporation of India’s root cause analysis for the April 12 UPI outage report said that a heavy load of transaction success requests from merchants and banks hit the system than was permitted, causing the platform to face downtime. NPCI runs UPI, the country’s most popular digital payments system.
“The issue was identified to be caused by the flooding of ‘Check transaction’ AΡΙ. Further, it was observed that a few payment service provider (PSP) banks were also sending requests for ‘Check transactions’ even for older transactions multiple times,” the NPCI report said. UPI faced four outages in the last three weeks, causing major inconvenience to millions of people.
NPCI findings show repeated queries from banks to check transaction status downed system on April 12
Banks check whether a transaction was successful or not when they do not get a response from the customer’s beneficiary bank. This could be because the beneficiary bank’s server might have been down and it could not respond to a transaction success check request from a PSP bank. A PSP bank is the UPI app’s banking partner that connects them with the NPCI system. If the PSP bank does not get a response, it tends to check for the transaction success status repeatedly at a fixed time interval so that it can decide whether it should start processing more payments.
According to NPCI, PSP banks also did not wait for the response from UPI system and were repeatedly flooding the UPI system with ‘Check transaction’ requests leading to further congestion in the system, and prolonged downtime for the platform. As per NPCI operating circulars, the “Check Transaction” API call needs to be used only once in the interval of 90 seconds.