Ongoing Apple Pay Outage Stops Users From Accessing eWallet, Paying Bills

An outage at Apple prevented users from paying their bills and accessing other features on Sunday, April 26. However, the tech giant said the issue had been solved by the end of the day Sunday.

The outage started at around 8:45 a.m. Users couldn’t lock or unlock their physical cards and couldn’t request new numbers or cards, a release stated.

Apple’s System Status said that “some users” were affected, though it was unclear how many.

Users reported attempting to schedule AppleCard payments, but then being met only with indefinite “processing” messages, with no apparent resolution.

It was also recently discovered that some users of Apple could have been left exposed to a zero-click email hack.

The attack consisted of an email to a victim’s inbox, which, when clicked, would have triggered the vulnerability in iPhones, iPads and some other software.

According to the San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup ZecOps, the attacks had targeted several high profile victims, such as a North American Fortune 500 company, a Japanese airline executive, a German VIP, a European journalist and more.

Apple, like almost every other high-profile tech company, is looking at a fiscal year projected to be weakened due to the coronavirus pandemic. Goldman Sachs recently changed its recommendation from neutral to sell, saying that the firm could see a one-third drop in iPhone sales in Q2. Analysts said sales for the iPhone could fall 36 percent year over year in Q2 because of the virus.

CEO Tim Cook recently spoke about the possibility of reopening stores, which were uniformly closed in March along with those of many other high-profile retailers. Cook said whenever the stores might reopen, there would be proper social distancing guidelines in effect and temperature checks at the door.

Cook said he was confident about the company’s prospects in the long term, and said Apple had been paying all workers as it had before the mass shutdowns.

Cook knows it won’t be easy, though; he reportedly said he was looking more at the long term than at any immediate fixes.