- By Jennifer Meierhans
- Business reporter
Bakery chain Greggs has shut some of its stores due to an issue accepting payments.
Customers found branches of the bakery chain closed or cash only.
It follows card payment outages at Sainsbury’s and Tesco on Saturday, and McDonald’s last Friday.
Greggs told the BBC a technical issue had affected tills in some shops but said: “The majority of shops affected are now able to take card and cash payments again.”
The company apologised to customers and said: “We expect the issue to be fully resolved shortly.”
Customers posted on social media their disappointment at being greeted by closed doors or having to leave empty handed as they did not have any cash.
One posted on X, formerly Twitter: “Greggs this morning cash only! Sitting here with my coffee watching almost everyone have to walk out.”
Greggs operates more than 2,450 shops across the UK. But it is unclear how many have been affected by the payment problem and the BBC has spoken to some that are operating normally.
Stores in cities including London, Manchester, Cardiff and Glasgow have reportedly had issues although some have now been resolved.
A worker at a Greggs store in Manchester told the BBC that when staff turned on the tills on Wednesday morning an error meant no items were displayed. She said someone had arrived to fix the till so the store was now open but others in the area were closed while they waited for technical help.
In Exeter a staff member told the BBC two of their three tills were not working due to the error but they were serving customers on the remaining one. “I called shop support and they said they are working through the error and to not call back,” she said.
Signs entitled “Oh Crumbs!” have appeared in the doors of some shops including branches in Hillsborough, Chelmsford and Ludgate Hill in London.
The issue at Greggs is the latest in a series of technical glitches hitting some of the UK’s biggest food brands.
Sainsbury’s could not fulfil most online grocery deliveries on Saturday due to issues with an overnight software update which also hit contactless payments in stores. Unrelated technical issues also forced Tesco to cancel a “small number” of orders.
These events have sparked speculation that the issues could be related.
Ilkka Turunen, field chief technology officer at software supply chain management firm Sonatype, told the BBC: “The fact that these issues happened in sequential days, though, does hint at a common issue.
“It’s possible the simultaneous glitch at multiple leading UK supermarkets was the result of ongoing outages at a common network or payments infrastructure provider. Equally as likely is an issue at the software level, which for large businesses is a mesh of interdependent systems.”
Fans of Greggs have joked on social media that IT issues affecting the other brands were serious but an outage at the sausage roll chain was a step too far.
Bal Bansal posted on X: “Just heard Greggs are having an IT issue and having to close shops… personally, I think this is bordering a national emergency! Can all IT folk go and help Greggs… potentially, steak bakes as a reward!”
A statement from Greggs 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.”
Additional reporting by Charlotte McDonald and Tom Gerken