JPMorgan Chase, which operates the largest U.S. commercial bank, erroneously shot down some consumers’ attempts to make purchases with its credit cards on Black Friday.
The company noted the faulty “declines” for some of its Chase bank branded credit cards when asked by Payments Dive about customers’ complaints online. Some customers said their cards were being declined despite plenty of credit available for their accounts.
“We approved most credit card transactions Friday as usual, but declined some that we would usually approve,” a spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase said in an emailed statement. He didn’t respond to a question about the number of erroneous declines.
The spokesperson also didn’t explain the hiccup in credit approvals. It happened just as Americans were embarking on purchases for one of the biggest shopping days of the year, Black Friday, during which retailers discount some merchandise ahead of the year-end holidays.
Despite the New York bank’s problems, the largest U.S. credit card networks said their operations were running as usual on Friday. Spokespeople for Visa, the biggest network, and No. 2 Mastercard said on Monday that their systems hadn’t experienced any trouble in processing payments that day.
The Chase trouble was reported earlier via consumer complaints posted on the website Downdetector, an online dashboard for monitoring outages that is run by Ookla, a unit of digital media and internet company Ziff Davis.
