Goldman Sachs - Apple Card authorizations declined without reason

This week, charges to my Apple Card were suddenly declined, but only for transactions based on prior authorizations. New charges went through just fine.

A likely cause is that I replaced my phone this week. On Wednesday, I replaced an iPhone 15 Pro with an iPhone 16 Pro. The old phone was at iOS 26.5. The newer phone had a slightly old software version (26.3 maybe?). When I transferred my data from the old phone to the new phone, it transferred the Apple Pay cards including the Apple Card. I subsequently erased the old phone after about a day.

I did notice something in my Apple Card, something about how the virtual card expiration and CVV had changed, but that the number had not changed. I'm not sure why that happened. I wish I'd gotten a screen shot.

On Thursday, a recurring payment to Patreon failed (declined by the bank). I went to the Patreon site and could see it has a virtual number linked that's different from what's now shows in my phone. The number and expiration date do not reflect anything I see in my phone. My phone does show a virtual card number and additional card numbers, but none of those match what's in Patreon. Interestingly, if I "Retry" the payment, it shows as "successful":

Even though it continues to show "Declined" and shows the stale numbers. I suspect when they actually try to charge it, it will be declined again.

The same thing happened for Blue Apron Friday morning and again Saturday morning, and there, the situation is worse (see #1), because the Blue Apron system does not provide any way to manage Apple Pay payments or retry them (even when escalating through human support).

I spent a long time with Apple Support and Goldman Sachs support to try to figure out the issue. The declined payments did show in their system but for reason "other". Even escalating to security specialists and Apple Card specialists, they were unable to identify the actual reason for the declined payments. The best they could suggest was for me to log out and log into my apple id again (a waste of time, I'm sure).

I suspect what happened was that either through a glitch or through design, the act of replacing my phone caused the virtual card associated with that phone to be burned and all prior authorizations to become invalid. If it was a glitch, it's something Apple should be working to solve. If it was by design, this known issue should be documented publicly and ideally the user given a prominent warning when replacing a phone, something like:

> Any prior purchase authorizations will become invalid; please contact all of your recurring subscriptions and re-authorize a payment method.

I reported the issue to Apple and it's been escalated, and I'm hoping to hear back in the next 10 business days on how they'll address it.

The report names no repository files, tests, or implementation entry point. Start by determining whether this repository has any Apple Card or iOS payment-related code; done would require a confirmed cause and a defined fix or public warning for authorizations invalidated after phone replacement.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.