Well this is a new one – Apple Pay seems to be on the fritz today, at least for Chase customers. Several Verge staffers, myself included, just had Apple Pay transactions declined when using Chase cards – even though our physical cards still worked fine.
I posted about it online and tons of others confirmed the same headache. But oddly enough, it’s only affecting certain banks. Friends with Citi and other non-Chase accounts haven’t noticed any issues. Weird!
Making matters weirder, Apple’s system status site has shown Apple Pay/Wallet in a mysterious maintenance mode since noon. What kind of “maintenance” randomly blocks digital payments mid-day?!
Sure enough, the overwhelmed Chase customer service lines reflect something’s up, with hold times up to 15 minutes now. Reps keep apologizing for “unexpected system upgrades”, which I must say is the most corporate euphemism for “crap, our stuff’s broken!” I’ve ever heard.
Unfortunately no timeline given for when this mess resolves. I reached out to Apple but no word back yet on what exactly went down on their end.
*UPDATE: An Apple spokesperson got back to me saying this was 100% NOT an Apple issue. Essentially implying the fault lies entirely with Chase systems. Fun shade! That maintenance notice was also unrelated to today’s Chase/Apple Pay snafu. Just one big unfortunate coincidence I suppose.
So there you have it – today’s digital payment outage appears to stem from Chase gremlins, according to Apple. When corporate titans start finger pointing at each other like that, who can really say where the truth lies?
In any case, Apple Pay seems to work fine for non-Chase folks. But Chase customers may want to reach for their physical cards instead until this mess sorts itself out.
Anyone else run into issues using Chase cards with Apple Pay today? What happened in your case? Let me know in the chat! And as always, stay tuned for updates should this mysterious outage cause more chaos.
