Card payments at high-street giants like Asda, McDonald’s, Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury’s crashed on Thursday morning, with shoppers reporting they had been forced to use cash only.
Consumer data analytics website Down Detector showed more than 600 customers having problems with their Visa cards on Thursday morning.
Shoppers complained on social media about the outage, which has hit major retailers.
One posted: “McDonald’s what a s*** show – cash only but didn’t think to put signs up before your drive thru to warn people idiocy.”
Another wrote to Sainsburys asking: “Is there any chance I can be informed when the card payment system is up and running please, so that I do not have another 10 mile round trip journey wasted?”
A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said the issue affected contactless payments but only lasted for a few minutes before being resolved.
“Contactless payment is back up and running after being briefly unavailable for a few minutes this morning,” they said.
“This was due to an issue with our third-party payment provider. We’re accepting all payments as usual and continue to monitor the situation. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
An Asda spokesperson said on Thursday morning that it was “working hard to get this fixed as soon as possible”. At just after 10.30am the shop confirmed card payment services were back operating as normal.
The source of the issue appeared to be an outage at Visa’s end, a spokesperson said.
A Visa spokesperson confirmed it was aware cardholders were “experiencing issues when making payments”.
“While Visa’s systems are operating normally, we are working with our partners to investigate,” they added.
(This story is being updated)