【2020.10 Update】The system has been down again these past few days. Recently, the extra 3x on AMEX refer has been pretty strong, so there may be a large number of people cashing out MR. Not sure whether the two are related. Based on the pattern of the outages described below, it should just be a matter of time before it comes back.

【07/01 Update】Today I tried to cash out points, but kept getting an error saying the information was incorrect. (Reader Jin ran into the same issue, so it looks like this is a real outage.) See below:

Also, after three attempts, the cash-out function gets locked and you need to call to have it unlocked (800-297-1234).

I called, and the customer service rep was very friendly. He unlocked it for me and asked me to try again, but it still returned the same error. The rep then tried to process the redemption manually after asking for the information required by their internal system, but the same error came up there too. After three tries, it got locked again. Unlock, three more tries, locked again. The rep said he needed to bring in a technical colleague. In reality that did not help at all and just led to another dead loop. In the end, the tech asked for screenshots, and then the call got disconnected midway. Unbelievable. I’ll wait a couple of days and see.

Not sure if I just had bad luck. I was still cashing out last week, but this week it stopped working. Switching browsers and clearing cache did not solve it either, and I also missed out on the compensation points that customer service might have offered.

【Note: If you contact AMEX customer service and the issue still is not resolved after a long call, they will often proactively offer compensation of around 3,000-5,000 MR points. If you have been on the phone for a long time, you can also hint at it yourself. I did not even get the chance to hint before my phone ran out of battery.】

【05/18 Update】It has been fixed again. One sign that it is fixed is that you may suddenly receive the redemption confirmation email that was not sent to you earlier. Based on past experience, a conservative estimate is that the next outage should happen 10 days later, likely around May 25-27...

AMEX Platinum for Schwab has been one of the best recent tools for cashing out MR, but ever since the first system issue, new outages have been happening frequently, or roughly once every 10 days or so...

  • Around 04/25 it went down for the first time, but it recovered quickly
  • Around 05/05, it went down again, but it also recovered quickly
  • Around 05/16, it went down again, and it is unclear when it will recover

It feels like it is most likely to go down on Fridays and over the weekend, and redemptions no longer post instantly. If your first redemption is a large one, you may also need to call in to verify your information.