After a payment issue was resolved, Greggs stores reopened
On Wednesday morning, customers discovered that some branches were closed or could only take cash.
It comes after Tesco and Sainsbury’s on Saturday had card payment failures, as well as McDonald’s on Friday.
Greggs apologized to customers for “any inconvenience” and claimed it has “resolved a technical issue” that affected tills in some of its stores.
Previous customers had expressed their dismay on social media about arriving to find closed doors or having to depart empty-handed because they were short on cash.
A user wrote on X, which was once Twitter: “Cash only for Greggs this morning! As I sip my coffee, I observe nearly everyone having to leave.”
In the UK, Greggs has around 2,450 locations. The number of affected stores was unknown, however problems were reported in London, Manchester, Cardiff, and Glasgow, among other locations.
When employees turned on the tills on Wednesday morning, an issue meant that no items were displayed, a Greggs employee in Manchester told the BBC. She stated that although some stores in the vicinity were closed as they awaited technical assistance, the store was able to reopen after someone came to fix the till.
A staff member in Exeter told the BBC that they experienced an issue with two of their three tills, but they were still able to service clients on the other one. “I called shop support and they said they are working through the error and to not call back,” she stated.
Some storefronts, including ones in Hillsborough, Chelmsford, and Ludgate Hill, London, had signs that read “Oh Crumbs!”
The most recent in a string of technological hiccups affecting some of the largest food businesses in the UK is the problem at Greggs.
On Saturday, Sainsbury’s was unable to complete the majority of its online food delivery because of problems with an overnight software update that also affected contactless payments in-store. Tesco was also obliged to cancel a “small number” of orders due to unrelated technical concerns.
A “global technology system outage” the day before prevented McDonald’s locations from accepting orders globally.
The possibility that the problems are connected has been raised by these occurrences.
At the software supply chain management company Sonatype, which services companies like Toyota, American Express, and T-Mobile, Ilkka Turunen serves as the field chief technology officer. “The fact that these issues happened in sequential days, though, does hint at a common issue,” he stated to the BBC.
“It’s probable that continuous disruptions at a shared network or payments infrastructure provider caused the simultaneous issue at several well-known UK supermarkets. A software problem is also likely to arise since large firms have a web of interconnected systems.”
On social media, Greggs’ fans made jokes about how serious IT problems were for other firms, but that an outage at the chain of sausage rolls was a bit much.
On X, Bal Bansal wrote: “Heard that Greggs is closing their stores due to an IT problem. In my opinion, we are getting dangerously close to a national emergency! Can everyone in IT please go help Greggs? Maybe as a treat, steak bakes!”