Customers at Sainsbury’s and Asda were among those complaining that their card payments were blocked on Thursday morning, leaving some supermarkets unable to accept cash only.
The supermarkets apologized to customers who were unable to pay for their purchases on Thursday morning due to technical problems.
On X (formerly Twitter), people complained that they had taken their shopping basket to the checkout only to be told they could not pay by credit card, or that stores had temporarily put up signs saying “cash only”.
Sainsbury’s told customers it had been alerted to a nationwide issue with card payments this morning, but said the problem had since been resolved.
A spokeswoman said: “Contactless payment is available again after being briefly unavailable for a few minutes this morning.
“This was due to an issue with our third-party payment provider.
“We are accepting all payments as usual and apologize for any inconvenience.”
The problems appeared to originate from a provider that handles card payments for some retailers.
Worldline said there had been a service interruption, which may have resulted in some retailers experiencing problems processing payments in stores between 9am and 10am.
It was later announced that service had been fully restored, but apologized for the temporary outages.
Asda also apologised to customers on X who said their local stores only accepted cash payments in the morning.
Hi Nick, thanks for reaching out. We are aware of the issue and are working hard to fix it as quickly as possible. I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. – Sam 🔮
— Asda Service Team (@AsdaServiceTeam) July 11, 2024
Payments company Visa confirmed on Thursday that its systems were functioning normally.
A Visa spokesperson said: “We are aware that a merchant payment provider reported issues this morning affecting some cardholders.
“It has been reported that this issue has now been resolved. Visa’s systems continue to function normally.”
Mastercard also confirmed that its own network was functioning properly and, after an investigation, said that this morning’s problems were “not related to our systems.”
The problems are the latest in a series of technical issues that have affected banking and digital payments in recent months.
Last month, there were outages on the UK network, preventing some people from sending and receiving payments via online and mobile banking.
