Paytm App Goes Down for the Second Time in 24 Hours

Advertisement boards of Paytm, a digital wallet company, are seen placed at stalls of roadside vegetable vendors as they wait for customers in Mumbai. (Photo: Reuters)

The Paytm app has been taken down from the iOS app store due to an error in its software, commonly known in technical parlance as a bug. This means iPhone users will not be able to use the payment app till it has been rectified. This is the second time in less than 24 hours that the app has suffered a glitch.

While Paytm is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the government’s demonetisation drive, this sudden opportunity for digital wallets and payment platforms have also exposed them to a deluge of new customers, adding strain to the existing infrastructure and exposing them to the underlining risk and difficulties in managing such a large number of transactions.

Today we found a bug in our iOS App where certain app users were not able to pay thereby hanging their app. Soon the system logged them out, preventing them from further accessing their account. We are sending an app update to Apple immediately and requesting them to approve the same as soon as possible. Once live, we request our users to update their iOS app.

Paytm’s official blog

Error message displayed on the Paytm app. 

A senior executive at Paytm told BloombergQuint that a bug which was sending multiple requests to the servers led to a sudden surge and brought the entire server down, which caused the outage faced by both Android and iOS users on Tuesday.

He added that the Android application was working fine, and since the bug was in the iOS platform, the digital wallet firm had decided to take down the older version.

We removed the app and have uploaded the new version. It usually takes 1-2 days for the Apple to approve the update. We submitted the latest app by 5:30 pm on Wednesday and have requested them to review it quickly and hopefully it will be back by Thursday 7 am. 

Paytm’s senior executive

Paytm has been witnessing a 5 percent hike in daily transaction since November 8, when the Prime Minister announced the demonetization scheme.

From 7 million users we are now seeing a transaction size of more than 10 million users and it is increasing

Many of Paytm’s 164 million users have taken to Twitter to express their anguish at not being able to use the digital wallet.

(Read the original report here: BloombergQuint)