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.”