PhonePe & Other UPI Providers Suffer Heavily Due To Yes Bank Crisis

PhonePe and other UPI Service providers who partnered with Yes Bank suffer heavily after RBI decides to take control and restrict the withdrawal limit.

Even as customers of Yes Bank are chafing at the RBI having limited withdrawals of up to Rs. 50,000, the effect is spreading throughout the rest of the banking ecosystem.

PhonePe and a number of other payment apps, which had Yes Bank as their banking partner, suffer long outages as Yes Bank is going through its crisis. At about midnight last night, an official Twitter account from PhonePe said they were “temporarily unavailable.” “We are temporarily unavailable. We have an unplanned maintenance activity going through. We apologize for any inconvenience that may result from it. We will be back very soon, “tweeted PhonePe.

We are temporarily unavailable.

We are going through an unscheduled maintenance activity. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

We’ll be back soon.

— PhonePe (@PhonePe_) March 5, 2020

Soon after, users began reporting how the PhonePe software had stopped functioning. PhonePe is one of India’s largest UPI devices, and there are now more UPI transactions than debit and credit card transactions, and many people have been affected.
Sameer Nigam, CEO of PhonePe, took Twitter this morning to provide more information about the outage. “Dear customers at PhonePe. We sincerely regret this long stalemate. RBI had put our partner bank (Yes Bank) under moratorium.

The whole team has been working all night to get services back up as quickly as possible. We hope to live in a couple of hours. Thank you for your patience. Hold on for updates!”And he tweeted. He also said they had not expected a situation like that would happen. “There are multiple levels of redundancy (in our systems). The bank itself just never thought it would go dark like this. Lesson learned in the most difficult way possible. Yet we are going to come out stronger and robust. That is a promise to you and to all our clients!!!” he said.

Dear @PhonePe_ customers. We sincerely regret the long outage. Our partner bank (Yes Bank) was placed under moratorium by RBI. Entire team's been working all night to get services back up asap. We hope to be live in a few hours. Thanks for your patience. Stay tuned for updates!

— Sameer.Nigam (@_sameernigam) March 6, 2020

It wasn’t just PhonePe which was affected. Brokerages including Zerodha, HDFC Mutual Fund, and 5Paisa said they would not be able to make transfers to Yes Bank clients, and asked clients to change their primary banks.

But even as outages were faced by PhonePe and other devices, some in the Indian startup community urged the industry to help one another. “This is a defining moment for Indian Fintech,” wrote Nikhil Kumar, who was part of the team that created the BHIM app for the Indian government. How we behave now – pull each other up or down will truly show who we are as a community. I request all founders to restrain from any kind of guerilla marketing at this point!”

Bipin Preet Singh, of Mobikwik, said that his company would extend its support to those affected. “We at Mobikwik are extending our full support to our friends and others who are affected by Yes bank mess at this time of systemic failure in the UPI ecosystem. We are here to support and hope there will be a quick resolution, “he said, and PhonePe CEO Sameer Nigam thanked him.

At this time of systemic failure in UPI ecosystem, we at @MobiKwik extend our full support to our friends @_sameernigam @ashneergrover and others who are impacted by Yes bank mess. We are here to help and hope there is a quick resolution.

— Bipin Preet Singh (@BipinSingh) March 6, 2020

For India’s fintech room to be in, it’s a very unique situation and it will definitely test the robustness of the newly built UPI platform. UPI has emerged as India’s most popular payment platform over the last few years, zooming past debit and credit card debts.

But its prominence also means that threats are now increasing more than ever — only Yes Bank is affected by the current crisis, but PhonePe, which has been used by all banks ‘ customers, has also experienced an extended outage. UPI is currently looking at what is potentially its biggest challenge yet, and how it tackles it might help to determine its course in the years ahead.