Purpose: The present study aims to gauge the perspectives of students on the difficulties they faced during online learning during the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) through the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) technique. Design/methodology/approach: The current study employed IPA, and it was conducted among the students enrolled for professional courses in the government, private and deemed-to-be universities in Uttarakhand, India, using semi-structured interviews for the purpose of data collection. Findings: The findings have been grouped under five parts referred to as "superordinate themes" or "barriers" which comprises learning in an online class environment, online learning in the home environment, student-teacher relationship in online learning, technical hindrances in online learning and health issues in online learning. These superordinate themes were further grouped under sub-themes. Research limitations/implications: The present study focused on the students of various private, public and deemed-to-be universities of the Uttarakhand region and represents the higher education sector only and did not tap the primary, secondary and vocational education. The students of academic courses or degree courses like arts, commerce, basic sciences and humanities, etc. were not included in the research study. Hence, the study lacks generalizability. Practical implications: The research findings of the present study have implications for higher education institutions (HEIs), teachers, students and policymakers. Originality/value: The present study addresses the methodological gap by offering a new line of research where IPA has been used as the methodology to determine the barriers of online learning in the COVID-19 situation, and to the best of the authors' knowledge, none of the studies have used it so far to ascertain the barriers to online learning from the student perspective.