East Japan Railway Co. said Saturday it was temporarily hit by a system failure, with its Mobile Suica app users left unable to charge electric money to their smartphones, while passengers also could not make credit card payments at stations.
Some malfunctions were also reported for the Mobile Pasmo app for public transport in the Tokyo metropolitan region the same day, its operator, Pasmo Co., separately announced. The companies are trying to determine if the two cases are connected.
Both systems were restored around 1 p.m. after experiencing the problems in the early hours of the day.
The system failure at JR East also left passengers unable to make or change reservations online, the company said.
The outage is believed to have been caused by a power failure during work on the system server, it said.
Meanwhile, Mobile Pasmo users could not perform functions like receiving refunds, checking usage history or applying via the website to reissue Pasmo cards, the operator said.
Employees at JR Shimbashi Station in Tokyo were seen explaining the situation to customers, with some people forced to go to nearby automated teller machines to get cash as they could not use their credit cards.
A 38-year-old beautician from Saitama Prefecture, neighboring Tokyo, said, "I hope they don't allow for this kind of thing to happen (again)," after he could not reissue his commuter pass.
"I was in a bind because I couldn't buy tickets on my smartphone," said a 51-year-old man at JR Tokyo Station who had been trying to buy shinkansen bullet train tickets online. "Had it been a weekday, it could have been even worse," he said.
