Afterpay, a leading buy now, pay later service, announced it has mostly resumed operations following a massive outage that disrupted payment services for millions of users worldwide.

The disruption, which began around 2 PM AEDT, impacted the app, consumer and merchant portals, online and in-store services, and the shopping directory. This issue persisted for approximately two hours before services were gradually restored by 4 PM AEDT.

The outage affected customers across Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada.

During the incident, an Afterpay spokesperson stated, “We are experiencing an outage at the moment that is affecting services. Our team is working hard to resolve this ASAP, and we’ll provide another update shortly.”

Service restoration was successfully achieved in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States just over two hours after the initial disruption.

More than two hours later, services were restored in Australia, New Zealand and the US. 

Afterpay is still working to restore services in Canada. 

It has not said what caused the issue.

Afterpay is a popular buy now, pay later service that lets customers purchase items immediately and pay them off in four interest-free instalments. 

It has about 3.5 million customers in Australia and more than 24 million users worldwide.