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TfL have informed me that owing to the AWS outage yesterday (20/10/2025) What caused the AWS outage – and why did it make the internet fall apart? Amex cards are not working for travel via Apple and Google Pay today. Cards are giving an error code 67 on the barrier. “Card not approved”
TfL are working on resolving the issue ASAP.
This seems to have been going on since Sunday (19/10/2025)
Few threads following this issue:
Thanks for raising this issue. I’ve heard back from my contact at TfL who says:
The Amex Google Pay issue was unrelated to the AWS outage and has now been resolved. There was no impact from the AWS outage for TfL’s fares collection.
This makes sense given that the Amex issue started on Sunday whereas the AWS outage wasn’t until Monday.
Thanks, and I agree on the timing regarding the AWS outage.
I was unable to get an answer regarding the actual cause of the outage or why the service desk informed me, and presumably others, based on the Reddit posts above, that it was due to AWS. My guess is that it was likely human error.
I the only response I did get to my ticket was:
“The technical issue affecting American Express (Amex) cards via Google Pay has now been resolved. Testing results throughout the morning have been positive, and we are not seeing any further reports of declined transactions. For any customers who experienced difficulties earlier, please advise that this was due to a temporary technical fault which made Google Pay transactions unavailable. The issue has since been fixed, and services are now operating as normal.”
I think the fact that most of the Gpay issues will have happened after the AWS outage started probably meant that some staff did jump to the wrong conclusion. In fact, if I hadn’t been aware of an issue on Sunday and had a problem on the Monday morning, I’d have jumped to the same conclusion myself.
As to what caused the issue itself, you’ll not get more than they’ve said. It was probably an issue at TfL’s end, but maybe caused by a change implimented by either GPay or Amex, that TfL hadn’t properly understood or wasn’t properly explained to them. As long as no-one is out of pocket then it’s just one of those things that happen occasionally. And I say that as someone who loves to know exactly what happened and gets frustrated when people won’t explain.
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