Apple Pay Suffers Visa Cards Glitch

Apple Pay users who attempted to link their Visa cards to the service may have had some difficulty doing so recently.

For about seven hours yesterday (Feb. 10), reports 9to5Mac, a glitch within Apple’s mobile wallet prevented users from setting it up — at least as far as Visa cards were concerned.

The outlet notes that, apparently, the issue did not extend to the linking of users’ American Express, MasterCard or Discover cards to the service; it was strictly related to attempts to link Visa debit and credit cards to Apple Pay.

Furthermore, the glitch did not affect consumers’ ability to use Visa cards that had been set up on Apple Pay prior to the period in question yesterday; those transactions, shares 9to5Mac, were able to be conducted as usual, using an iPhone or an Apple Watch.

Apple acknowledged that the Visa-linking issue affected “some users” of Apple Pay beginning around 4:15 a.m. ET on Wednesday; a detailed timeline on Apple’s system status page appears to confirm the roughly seven-hour period during which the problem existed.

After 9to5Mac posted its initial report on the Apple Pay issues related to linking Visa cards, the site later updated it to include mention that Apple had made it known that the outage had been resolved.

As of last night, no details had been shared by Apple (or any news outlet) regarding the number of Apple Pay users who were affected by the glitch, nor as to the technical specifics that might have caused it.