Apple Pay and Apple Cash experienced an outage on Friday

AppleInsider

An Apple Pay and Apple Cash problem left users unable to complete transactions for just over an hour on Friday, as Apple was quick to resolve the issues.

Apple Pay and other Apple services experienced an outage on Friday.

According to the System Status page on Apple's website, several Apple Services were affected by an outage. At around 11:14 AM Eastern Time on Friday, users began experiencing difficulties with Apple Card, Apple Cash, Apple Pay, and Apple Wallet. Other Apple-branded services, such as the iOS App Store and iCloud appear to have been unaffected.

The company's website now states that all of the issues with Apple's various payment-related services have been resolved, as of 1:01 PM Eastern Time. During the outage, many iPhone users took to social media to complain, saying they couldn't complete Apple Pay transactions or use Apple Cash.

Apple Cash is a popular payment service, similar to CashApp, Venmo, and Zelle, but under the Apple umbrella. Apple Card, meanwhile, is an Apple-branded credit card, whereas Apple Pay enables contactless payments on the iPhone and Apple Watch through NFC technology.

The Wallet app lets users store digital IDs, driver's licenses, boarding passes, and credit cards, among other things. All of Apple's payment-related services were affected by the Friday service issue.

Apple's services periodically experience issues for various reasons. Apple Wallet experienced a similar problem in December 2023, and Apple Cash users faced a service issue in May of the same year. More recently, Apple Cash experienced another outage in January 2025.



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sitime

At this point I’ve almost entirely switched over to Apple Pay. The last major store that I often frequent finally switched over from their non-NFC payment terminals to ones that support NFC. What a pleasant surprise that was! I’m glad to finally use my phone for almost everything (whether it be Apple Pay or another payment method that uses my phone).

BUT — for reasons like this — it’s still good to carry around physical money for when digital payment methods decide to take a sick day. Mine has been jokingly dubbed as “techno-emergency money”, lol.

edited May 16

chasm

Likewise, I use Apple Pay for almost everything wrt day-to-day purchases. It's been very reliable and easy to use on my Apple Watch, meaning my actual wallet (which I do still carry just in case) has cobwebs on it.

mplsp

Restaurants are the other area where having a physical card is usually necessary. More are switching to portable payment devices that take ApplePay but they're still relatively uncommon IME.

chia

MplsP said:

Restaurants are the other area where having a physical card is usually necessary. More are switching to portable payment devices that take ApplePay but they're still relatively uncommon IME.

I suspect you’re referring to restaurants in the USA; this certainly isn’t the case for restaurants and bars in the U.K. or Europe: portable terminals have been in use for well over a decade, perhaps even up to two, where they have a great business advantage of vastly improving speed and efficiency of service. 

I’d go as far as to say that it’s a damning indictment of the US restaurant/bars and/or the financial organisations which serve them, that they have such a painfully slow rate of adoption of something which improves their business process and bottom line

ymin1

As I didn't know where the problem was: Wallet, Apple Pay, VISA Card, I was lost and didn't know what to do.

->Why doesn't Apple put a notification in the Wallet App ?