Apple Payment Services Restored After Short Outage

A number of Apple’s payment features were down for part of Wednesday (Dec. 20) morning.

The company’s Card, Cash, Pay and Wallet systems were down between 6:15 a.m. and 6:49 a.m. for some users, CNBC reported. However, Apple’s status page did not indicate the fix for another four hours, the report added.

Apple said the outages for Apple Pay and Apple Wallet impacted the web and in-app payment features. The company told CNBC the issue had been resolved.

The outage comes at a time when a majority of Americans are using mobile wallets to pay bills, though many of them report issues when doing so, according to a recent report.

“Digital Bill Payments: Frequent Mobile Wallet Bill Pay Users the Most Satisfied,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and ACI Worldwide collaboration, found that roughly 60% of consumers in the United States employ mobile wallets to pay bills, with more than two-thirds of them saying they were very satisfied with the experience.

However, 7 out of 10 of frequent users — those who use mobile wallets to pay bills at least once weekly — reported friction with this method.

“The study, which examined the benefits and challenges of using mobile wallet bill pay services, also found that in general, the number of issues mobile wallet users experienced when making payments increased with the number of bills paid,” PYMNTS wrote last week.

Forty-eight percent of those who paid just one bill in the 12 months prior to being surveyed had difficulties, versus 65% for those who had paid four or five different bills during the same period. These users likely saw more friction as they used these applications more often, but for those who used it sporadically, “experiencing any issue half the time is significant,” the report noted.

Meanwhile, separate research finds an increased use of mobile devices for shopping, with more and more consumers favoring these devices over desktops, laptops or voice-activated devices when buying groceries and other retail goods.

“Specifically, compared to December 2021, there’s been a nearly 50% jump in non-grocery retail purchases via mobile devices and a 35% surge in grocery purchases through the same platform,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this month.