The October 5 Apple Pay & Wallet outage that went completely unnoticed outside of Japan and Hong Kong was a very strange one. That’s because it was a very specific outage: ‘truth on the card’ transit cards with a stored value balance. But not all transit cards, only Suica, PASMO and Octopus. Similar transit cards such as Clipper, SmarTrip and TAP were unaffected. The former are FeliCa cards, the latter are MIFARE cards.
Let’s translate the Apple speak from the iCloud System Status page. Some users = FeliCa stored value card users, specifically: Suica, PASMO and Octopus. In addition to the not being able to add, suspend or remove existing cards, users could not recharge them (reload, top up, add money, etc.) but this issue was not listed. The add, suspend or remove existing card label gives us a big clue.
It soon became clear from the cacophony of Japanese tweet complaints that FeliCa credit/debit cards on the iD and QUICPay side were not a problem, only the stored value (SV) recharge, and practically unnoticed, Toyota Wallet iD prepaid card recharge. Meanwhile, Android Mobile Suica and Mobile PASMO users didn’t have any problems at all, everything worked fine. Bingo, the outage was an Apple Pay server problem, not caused by Mobile Suica or Mobile PASMO which was mistakenly reported by the Japanese media.
From the get-go Mobile Suica and PASMO support said it only an Apple Pay problem. Octopus Cards Limited, confoundedly coy as usual, didn’t say which ‘top up’ service wasn’t working but we damn well know it was Apple Pay. Overworked Suica, PASMO and Octopus support folk were left to clean up a recharge mess because the Apple Pay outage hit exactly at peak Tokyo morning commute time in the first real commuting week since the State of Emergency was lifted.
There was also another fascinating issue going on that most people didn’t pick up on. Suica and PASMO Apps offer 2 kinds of recharge: Apple Pay and their own direct credit card recharge system. Because Suica App recharge is independent of Apple Pay and deals directly with the Suica SV on the device, similar to adding cash at a station kiosk, it should have worked during the Apple Pay outage…but it did not. Why?
The FeliCa on Apple Pay story is a deep one. To date Apple Pay is the only digital wallet platform that offers all flavors of NFC (A-B-F) with the major transaction protocols that go with them, (EMV, FeliCa and MIFARE) as standard on all Apple NFC (and now also NFC + UWB) devices. The industry scuttlebutt in Japan is that to make this happen, Apple licensed a Mobile FeliCa key server from FeliCa Networks to manage their own Apple Pay devices. This indicates Apple’s commitment but I also believe was setup this way so that Apple Pay can safely backup the FeliCa card SV balance in Wallet if something goes wrong with the device or if some glitch happens during the recharge process from a credit/debit card, either Apple Pay (Wallet) or independent app (Suica, PASMO, Toyota Wallet).
Here is my take of what happened. Apple is preparing to launch 2 new FeliCa SV eMoney cards on Apple Pay very soon, WAON and nanaco. That means they need to reconfigure their FeliCa key server and Apple Pay server so that WAON and nanaco SV card balances are well protected because WAON and nanaco card balances are much bigger than Suica or PASMO, up to ¥40,000. If anything happens to the device, WAON and nanaco must always appear in the iOS 15 Wallet Previous Cards screen, otherwise users will freakout and won’t touch Apple Pay again. Hence the add, suspend, remove Apple Pay FeliCa SV card outage. It was a server configuration mistake on the Apple Pay side related to WAON and nanaco preparations to make sure those bigger card balances are ironclad protected.
In other words, WAON and nanaco are coming with iOS 15.1.
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