Apple Inc. on July 4 experienced a widespread outage that affected its iCloud services and some retail store operations in North America for about three hours.
The incident underscored the vulnerability of digital payment platforms to technical troubles. Visa and Mastercard have each experienced serious outages within the last couple of years.
Jennifer Bailey, vice president of online store at Apple Inc., smiles after speaking during the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, June 8, 2015. Apple Inc. kicked off its annual developers conference in San Francisco, where the company will unveil a revamped streaming-music service, improvements to its mobile software and tools to speed up smartwatch applications. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg *** Local Caption *** Jennifer Bailey
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
On Thursday, many customers were unable to sign in to their iCloud accounts or access related services, which Apple tracked on its system status page.
Twitter carried accounts of customers who were temporarily unable to check out at some Apple Stores during the midday outage, according to a Macrumors report. Apple did not return a request for comment.
Visa had a multinational processing outage in June 2018, and Mastercard suffered a serious outage in the U.K. about a year ago. Target had back-to-back payment system glitches one weekend last month, crippling its in-store checkout systems nationwide.
Farmers National Banc Corp. in Ohio plans to acquire in-state rival Middlefield Banc Corp. in a deal that will deepen the buyer's footprint in Columbus.
An apparent increase in large-scale borrower fraud and the hot environment for bank mergers were the key themes as banks discussed their third-quarter results.
Panelists speaking at American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Banking conference said they appreciate the deregulatory efforts underway under Trump, but said clarity on tariffs and rules of the road for emerging technologies would unlock future growth.
Five years after the government struggled to disburse pandemic relief checks, the Fed is using improved processing for emergency funds as a reason for banks to get onboard with FedNow.
Revolut receives a banking license, while SumUp introduces its payments hardware. That and more in the American Banker global payments and fintech roundup.