Apple Pay was down for Chase customers for quite a while

Update, February 18th, 12:40AM ET: The issue with Apple Pay and Chase credit cards has been resolved, according to Apple spokesperson Heather Norton, who further tells us that “this was not an Apple Pay issue, and we saw no problems with our systems.” (The not-so-subtle subtext there being that this was a Chase problem, of course.) That maintenance note on the status page was unrelated to this outage, she adds. Original story follows below.

It appears that Apple Pay is down, particularly for Chase customers — Verge staffers have had their cards declined while trying to pay with Chase cards using Apple Pay, while using the same physical card works just fine. Several people on Threads confirmed the same issue when I asked — although people with non-Chase banks like Citi appear to be using Apple Pay just fine.

Apple’s system status page says that Apple Pay and Wallet have a maintenance in progress which started at 12PM — which is a pretty weird time to start a maintenance that disrupts payments. The page also says that “Some Maryland Users may have issues,” but we’ve had reports in both New York and LA, so it appears we’re all into crab cakes and football today.

For what it’s worth, the Chase customer service line is currently up to 15-minute wait times, and agents are telling people that Apple Pay is “going through maintenance” to receive “an unexpected upgrade,” which is a delightful euphemism. Sadly, no one seems to know when things will be fixed. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment; we’ll update if we hear anything.