The U.K.’s largest baked goods chain Greggs was hit by technical problems with payments that meant it could take neither cash nor cards during the busy morning trading period today.
It forced some stores to close temporarily, which in normal times would be frustrating and embarrassing for any retailer. But these are not normal times, because since Friday technical glitches have closed down four of the U.K.’s biggest retail operations in the space of a few days.
Now the U.K.’s retail and F&B chains are waiting nervously to find out whether it’s nothing more than a weird coincidence or whether someone is targeting their payment system software.
The hugely popular Greggs has more than 2,450 bakeries across the U.K. and stores up and down the country were impacted by the IT problems, which forced some stores to put up temporary “closed” notices on their doors or request that customers place orders outside via the Greggs mobile app, before coming in to collect their purchases.
Greggs sought to downplay its troubles and said that it had experienced issues accepting payments in some outlets on Wednesday, but by mid-morning the problems had been fixed.
A spokesperson said: “We have now resolved the technical issue that affected tills in some of our shops earlier this morning. 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.”
Four Retailers Hit
Yet Greggs is just the latest retailer to be hit by technical problems. Fast food giant McDonald’s was struck by its own tech issues in a number of countries including the U.K., Japan and Australia on Friday, which the chain insisted had not been caused by a cybersecurity attack.
McDonald’s said of its outage that it had occurred at about midnight U.S. CET and that “many markets” were back online by Friday afternoon, while company global chief information officer, Brian Rice, insisted that the problem was not due to a cyber-attack but rather an unspecified change to IT systems run by a third party.
“What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it,” Rice wrote in a message to McDonald’s employees and franchise partners.
Yet the following day British grocery chain Sainsbury’s was forced to cancel home deliveries due to its own IT outage, which, according to the company, may have affected over $11 million worth of orders as it was unable to fulfil the vast majority of its planned online deliveries
The supermarket giant said the expensive glitch was caused by an overnight software update that prevented customers from making contactless payments in some of its stores or ordering food online, while chief executive Simon Roberts wrote to customers Sunday afternoon to apologise as he said all affected systems were back online.
Tesco Technical Issue
In a breathless weekend, just a few hours after Sainsbury’s issues, Tesco admitted that it had been forced to cancel online orders due to another unspecified “technical issue”.
A spokesman for Tesco said: “We are working to fix a technical issue which has meant we have had to cancel some online orders that were due for delivery today. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
Right now, all four retailers are insisting that the outages were caused by glitches or overnight updates gone wrong, albeit that an awful lot of dollars of trading downtime have been wasted on the problems these caused.
But the growing number of outages has raised concerns about both the reliance on technology to enable transactions – with the U.K. all but a cashless society post-pandemic – or of the risk of a cyber-attack.
Last year Ace Hardware and Staples were both hit by cyber-attacks, as was Coop in Sweden and independent U.K. store group Swan Retail, while WH Smith, Boots and Lush have also been targeted in Britain.
For now it does seem that this latest bout of technology problems has been a starnge coincidence…but a figth outage and the conspiracy theories will begin.
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