Paytm was out on cleansing drive on Thursday night

BENGALURU: Digital wallet company Paytm faced an outage due to system upgrade by the website post 8 pm on Thursday. The payments company, which claims to have 160-million users using the service both online and offline, saw an outage of services across mobile application, website and linked transactions such as Uber where Paytm is the only wallet partner.

The outage lasted close to an hour indicating the system was up for ‘cleansing’. The company says after the government move to push digital transactions in November, it has been processing over 5-million transactions daily. “Over the last month, we have seen a surge in usage and while we operate at multiple times the expected usage capacity, we continue to enhance and scale our infrastructure.

All banks and payment networks undertake scheduled downtimes to upgrade and carry out maintenance on their servers and infrastructure. This is another system upgrade,” said a statement issued by the company.

Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and @Paytmcare, the official Twitter handle of the company for grievance redressal, was busy fielding complaints on Twitter. “Super high traffic due to some more places installations going live in day. System coming back. Adding more capacity too,” read Sharma’s tweet explaining the outage.

Multiple users also complained that these activities should be scheduled during downtime at midnight and weekends. Peer-to-peer transactions and offline payments using the wallet were also affected.