Watchdog reviews payment failure at leading retailers
A STRING of high-profile IT outages that knocked sales offline at Greggs, Mcdonald’s, Tesco and Sainsbury’s in recent days is being scrutinised by the payments watchdog.
The Payments Systems Regulator (PSR) said it was reviewing the outages over the last week to see whether further action was needed amid potential concerns about the resilience of payments infrastructure.
It is in touch with the companies and liaising with the Bank of England about the unusual string of failures.
The scrutiny comes as the decline of cash makes shoppers increasingly dependent on digital payments systems. Cash has fallen from 54pc of all payments in 2012 to 14pc in 2022, according to UK Finance, and an increasing number of retailers are refusing to take cash.
On Wednesday, Greggs became the fourth major retailer in five days to have trouble accepting payments.
An IT glitch stopped hundreds of checkouts from working and forced it to close some of its stores. The bakery chain blamed a “technical issue”, leading to a flood of complaints on social media, before later saying it had resolved the problem.
Last Friday, Mcdonald’s was forced to close some restaurants, owing to a payments outage that it said was “caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change”.
Sainsbury’s and Tesco both had trouble processing payments and handling deliveries on Saturday.
“The PSR is aware of the recent payment issues and is assessing their nature to determine whether any further action is needed,” a spokesman said. The PSR monitors the UK’S major payments systems such as Mastercard, Visa and the Faster Payments scheme, rather than individual retailers.
If it identifies an issue with payments infrastructure resilience, it can pass the matter on to the Bank of England.
Payments and security experts have not identified a clear link between the four chains’ problems.
Greggs apologised to customers on Wednesday after the outage meant about a third of stores were unable to access payments. Sainsbury’s has promised to compensate affected customers.