Apple Pay Suffers First Major Outage

Apple Pay was unavailable for many of its yesterday as the service was hit by an unspecified issue which knocked it offline for several hours.

The outage, which began around 9am and lasted for at least eight hours, affected Visa users who were trying to add their debit and credit cards to Apple Pay, blocking them from accessing the digital wallet.

The issue did not appear to affect users of other cards, or users who already had uploaded their Visa cards on to Apple Pay before yesterday, with these customers able to carry out transactions as normal.

Down time

Apple admitted the issue, saying that “some users” had been affected, and was apparently fixed after seven hours, it told 9To5Mac.

Since its launch last July, more than 250,000 stores in the UK have pledged their support for Apple Pay, with nearly all the country’s major banks now also making their services available. This includes Barclays, which appeared last month to finally confirm that it will be working with the technology from later this year.

The service has seen strong adoption across the UK, particularly in London, where its use in paying for TfL transport services has seen mobile payments take off throughout the last few months.

A recent study by analyst firm Juniper Research has estimated that that the number of annual purchases made via mobiles, tablets, desktops and other connected devices should reach 125 billion annually by 2018 – 60 percent more than the total number of transactions in 2015.

A similar study by MasterCard found that one in four British consumers said that they expected to make a contactless payment with their mobile in the next year as more and more of us use our device to pay for goods and services.

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