Payments systems broke down recently at four major UK stores
Question of the Fortnight
It started at McDonald’s on Friday 15 March, when a fault with the payment system meant staff were unable to take orders. A day later the problem appeared to have spread to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, which couldn’t process contactless payments or deliver online orders. And on 20 March Greggs became the fourth major store in under a week to close its tills following a system failure.
What was going on? Was it coincidence or was the disruption connected? That’s what the UK’s Payments Systems Regulator (PSR) aims to find out. It said it’s aware of the faults and “is assessing their nature to determine whether any further action is needed”.
The PSR’s role is to make sure that payments systems “work well for everyone”. If it finds that a particular system is weak, it can pass the matter on to the Bank of England. The stores themselves didn’t give detailed explanations, citing vague “technical issues” or “configuration changes”.
Industry experts have suggested that because the problems occurred so close together they may have been caused by a failure in an IT network they all used, or in the company that provides their payment technology.
The latter seems more likely because the errors also affected the scanning of barcodes, which supermarkets need to carry out in order to process home deliveries.
The problems were so bad at Greggs and McDonald’s that they had to close some stores. But shoppers at Sainsbury’s and Tesco had another option – pay by cash. Remember doing that? It used to be popular once. As recently as 2012, 54 per cent of all payments were made with notes and coins. But this had plummeted to just 14 per cent by 2022.
The disruption highlighted how much we now rely on digital payments, and how vulnerable we’d be to a mass outage across the country – particularly if caused by Chinese or Russian hackers determined to cause havoc.
Many of those supermarket shoppers couldn’t pay by cash because they didn’t have any on them. Wallets and purses are increasingly places to store payment cards, not spare change.
People still turn to cash in tough times though. In 2022, with inflation at a 40-year high, cash payments actually rose by seven
