A nationwide outage of credit card payment systems began around 8am local time on July 16, 2026, affecting merchants including convenience stores across Japan, the companies Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS and Sumitomo Mitsui Card reported [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. The disruption blocked card payments at many locations nationwide.
The outage also affected transit payment apps. Mobile Suica users temporarily lost the ability to buy commuter passes or use credit card functions from about 8:15am [6, 7, 8]. Similarly, users of the Mobile Pasmo app in the Tokyo region faced login, recharge, and commuter pass purchasing issues starting around 9:25am, along with Apple Pay users encountering transaction failures [6, 7, 8].
Sumitomo Mitsui Card attributed the outage to an "international credit card issuing network abnormality," describing the cause as external to their system [6, 7, 8]. Mitsubishi UFJ NICOS and other issuers said they are investigating the root cause of the problem [1, 2, 3, 6, 4].
Retailer Aeon reported brief payment disruptions around 8am but resolved them quickly [6, 7, 8]. Saison Credit received about 100 customer inquiries concerning the inability to complete card payments during the peak of the outage between 9am and 11am [6, 7, 8].
The companies said the system was mostly restored by about 1pm on July 16, with credit card payments resuming at most merchants nationwide [6, 7, 8].
The outage's timeline shows payment failures beginning at 8am, followed by transit app failures shortly after, then customer service spikes, and near-complete restoration by early afternoon [1, 2, 3, 6, 4, 7, 5, 8].
The affected firms have not announced further disruptions or scheduled updates but continue probing the cause of the international network issue behind the outage [1, 2, 3, 6, 4].
