PSA: iOS 16 beta 6 bug causes Amex cards to be randomly removed from Apple Pay

If you’ve been having problems with your American Express cards and Apple Pay in iOS 16, you’re not alone. Apple has acknowledged an issue in the release notes for iOS 16 beta 6 where “American Express cards might need to be removed and re-added to Wallet.”

Amex and Apple Pay bug in iOS 16

The issue is affecting many people running the iOS 16 beta 6, including myself and multiple other 9to5Mac staffers. Essentially, the problem is that your American Express cards will be randomly removed from Apple Pay without reason, and you have to manually re-add them to your device.

Bugs are to be expected when running the iOS 16 beta, but this one is particularly stressful and frustrating. When your cards are removed from Apple Pay, you receive an email from American Express. In that email, Amex outlines multiple possibilities for why this might have happened if you didn’t manually make the change.

American Express lays out three possibilities:

• You turned off Passcode on your watch
• You signed out of iCloud on your watch; or
• Your Card was canceled.

It then goes on to say that there’s a possibility your entire American Express card account was canceled. The wording is just vague enough to make you think that the company closed your account, cutting off access to your cards and potentially any Membership Rewards points you had accumulated.

Thankfully, Apple’s iOS 16 beta 6 release notes acknowledge the problem. The wording in the release notes implied that you might need to manually remove and re-add your cards, but that’s not the case. Rather, the cards are removed on their own and you have to manually re-add them.

Hopefully, this is something Apple addresses with the next iOS 16 beta. In the meantime, it’s a frustrating and stressful bug, but the key is that it’s a bug and nothing to do with your specific American Express card or account. There’s no need to call Amex either, but we’ve heard that this issue is causing an influx of support inquires for the company’s customer support department.

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