Payments meltdown at Greggs, Sainsbury’s, McDonald’s and Tesco sparks urgent watchdog probe

A STRING of IT issues that knocked sales offline at four major retailers is now being investigated by a payments watchdog.

The digitial outages affected highstreet heavyweights Sainsbury’s, Greggs, McDonald’s and Tesco.

4

4

The problem relates to payment machines and checkouts that were not working, which caused problems with all four of the retailers over the last few weeks.

As a result, The Payments Systems Regulator (PSR) has said that it will now be investigating the outages that occured over the last week.

Major payment systems like Mastercard, Visa and the Faster Payments scheme are monitored by the watchdog, who will notify the Bank of England if they spot an issue relating to the payments infrastructure resilience.

Throughout the investigation they’ll be deciding if further action is needed, as there are concerns that it could be a hint that payments infrastructure is not resilient enough, reports the Telegraph.

The PSR are reportedly communicating with the mega firms that have been affected by it, while also liasing with the Bank of England.

The technical check comes as many retailers are now refusing to take cash – meaning a nation-wide payment outage could have severe consequences if the country continues to opt for digital-only payments.

According to UK Finance, Between 2012 and 2022 cash payments dropped from 54 percent to just 14 percent, and the list of stores that operate with digital-only payments continue to grow.

Earlier this week, bakery giant Greggs suffered an IT glitch which stopped hundreds of checkouts, and Brits all over the country did not hold back with complaints on social media.

The issue forced Greggs to close some of its branches, and they blamed it on a “technical issue”, later claiming that the problem was resolved.

Concerns have been raised that it could well be a broader issue, since last week McDonald’s suffered the same fate and had to close some of their restaurants.

At the time, they said it was caused by a third-party provider during a “configuration change”.

On top of that, Sainsbury’s and Tesco were struggling with their delivery service and processing payments. 

A spokesman for the The Payments Systems Regulator, said: “The PSR is aware of the recent payment issues and is assessing their nature to determine whether any further action is needed.”

Experts are yet to discover a link between the series of incidents, but there are suspicions that a software update from a shared provider is the cause of the payment-stopping problem.

4

The leading theory inside the industry – according to a payments consultant – relates to third-party “electronic point of sale” (EPOS) software, which records orders by linking inventory management to payments.

The system regularly handles barcode scanning, so it could explain why supermarkets struggled to process items and box them up ready to be delivered to customers.

Luckily security specialists have said that it’s unlikely to be a result of cyber attacks on the affected firms.

Cybersecurity expert Alan Woodward explained that although it looks like a simple error, it shows how “vulnerable” the payments infrastructure is and “potentially” shows what would happen if a hacker did make it into the “supply chain”. 

This comes after Tesco’s contactless payment system went “down” on February 3, and shoppers complained of huge queues and “absolute carnage”.

More than 400 users reported prolems with the usually nifty contactless payments at Tesco stores.

And irritated users rushed to X, formerly Twitter, to express their rage.

4

This post first appeared on thesun.co.uk