Greggs apologises to customers after tech glitch closes shops

GREGGS has apologised to customers after an IT glitch stopped hundreds of checkouts from working and forced it to close some of its shops.

The bakery chain said that checkouts in some of its stores had been hit by a “technical issue” yesterday morning, sparking a flood of complaints on social media.

Greggs said it had since resolved the issue and was reopening stores, adding: “The majority of shops affected are now able to take card and cash payments again, and we expect the issue to be fully resolved shortly.

“We apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused to our customers.”

It was not clear how many of the 2,450 shops Greggs operates were affected during the technical problems, but customers were quick to launch complaints on X, formerly known as Twitter. One user of X posted a picture of a sign on the entrance of a Greggs store that said it would be forced to open later because of technical issues. “What am I to do?!?!” wrote one user. “Awful start to the day,” said another. Stores in Manchester, London and Cardiff were among those affected, while some customers said their local bakery was open but only accepting cash.

The Greggs outage is the latest in a series of card payment issues across well-known high-street brands over the past few weeks, with Sainsbury’s and Tesco stores also hit by technical glitches over the weekend. The two supermarkets were forced to cancel home deliveries following issues understood to be unrelated to one another.

Analysis by The Telegraph suggested that Sainsbury’s orders worth as much as £9m could have been affected on Saturday. Simon Roberts, the Sainsbury’s chief executive, wrote to affected customers promising to deposit a voucher in their online delivery account following the issues.

Tesco, meanwhile, said technical problems forced it to cancel a small number of orders. Sainsbury’s contactless payments also failed. Mcdonald’s suffered technical problems last Friday as customers were unable to place orders because of a “third-party configuration change”.

The issues for the fast-food chain hit stores in the UK, Japan, China, Sweden and Australia.

Cyber security experts have said it is “strange to see” outages happening so close to each other.

Adam Pilton, a cyber security consultant, warned that the problems should alert us to “the dependence we place upon technology”.

There is no evidence the technical problems in recent days were caused by cyber attacks.

But Mr Pilton, who has investigated cybercrime as a former detective sergeant at Dorset Police, said that companies needed to prepare for the worst.

Andrew Martin, founder of the financial technology company SMEB, said the outages “shone a fresh light on the continued importance of cash in today’s society”.

“It is the latest sign that the march to a completely cashless society is a bad idea,” he added.