Payment-processing outages at UK retailers raise reliability issues for cashless transactions

“There is no way around it,” he said. “Typically, there are 10 intermediaries between a consumer swiping their credit card and a merchant getting paid.”

Varying payment-processing problems

The trouble started last Friday at McDonald’s, when reports surfaced that restaurants in the UK — but also in Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Germany, Austria, and Sweden — were unable to process orders for a period of time, forcing some of them to close.

The next day, UK supermarket Sainsbury’s took to X (formerly Twitter) to blame an “overnight software update” for a problem with contactless payments that meant it couldn’t deliver the “vast majority” of orders from its Groceries Online services. Stores were open as usual, however, accepting cash and card payments secured by chip and PIN.

Argos, a non-food retailer owned by Sainsbury’s, reported similar issues fulfilling same-day online orders, as well as placing new orders and collecting orders in-store. Meanwhile, Tesco, another major UK supermarket chain, also suffered an issue in processing a small number of orders on Saturday.

The problems persisted when yet another UK eatery — bakery chain Greggs — today suffered a payments-processing failure, with some locations accepting only cash payments or closing outright, according to a published report.

Most of the retailers reported getting systems back up online within a business day, which is not catastrophic but still longer than usual for software-related updates, IDC’s Press noted. “The surprising thing isn’t that [an update] caused an outage, but for how long,” he said. “Usually, they are resolved very quickly.”