Demonetisation: Paytm users go through hour long outage because of system upgrade

Paytm users faced an hour long outage, in times of increased dependence on digital transactions due to the crash crunch caused by demonetisation. The outage was due to a system upgrade where Paytm wanted to increase the capacity, because of a surge of users following the demonetisation. Paytm apologised for the inconvenience and thanked users for their patience after the service was restored.

https://twitter.com/Paytm/status/809432447767236608

The outage was a part of routine maintenance and upgrade operations, and is a standard practice for transaction networks around the world. Paytm was operating at multiple times of the expected usage capacity, and continues to scale its services according to demand, as reported in the Economic Times. Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar fielded queries about the outage on Twitter, citing a surge in traffic because of new installations coming live.

https://twitter.com/vijayshekhar/status/809410343680098304

Paytm had recently launched a payment method for users without internet connections . These offline transactions were also affected by the outage. Paytm recently also launched a crowd sourced help and support platform, where users could respond to queries by other users. Paytm has more than 160 million users. Over 5 million users were added after the demonetisation. Paytm processes over 7 million transactions a day , which are worth 120 crores in total.