There's trouble at till as card payment systems crash

A total of 872 branches of Sainsbury's were affected by the problems with credit and debit card payments.

Waitrose, Homebase and B&Q were also among stores hit, at about 2pm.

The difficulties lasted for about 20 minutes yesterday, according to a spokesman for Sainsbury's.

He said the problem was not restricted to Sainsbury's but had affected other retailers as well.

He added: "Many retailers across the country were affected by an issue with card payment systems today.

"The problem was rectified very quickly and all of our stores are now trading normally."

Shoppers left messages on the micro-blogging site Twitter about the problems.

LeighGriffin wrote: "So. Saturday afternoon in Sainsbury's. All card payments down. Chaos!"

A spokesman for Tesco said its supermarkets had not been affected.

A Barclaycard spokesman said: "We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused by this issue and we are conducting a thorough investigation into the cause of this issue."

Barclaycard would not divulge which of its customers were affected. Visa Europe said it had experienced no problems with its systems.

B&Q said it had manual card payment equipment at its 330 stores and was able to deal with the transactions that way.

Waitrose said its problems began in petrol stations before spreading to supermarket branches. It was able to deal with 95 per cent of payments via the back-up system.

Home Retail Group, which owns Homebase and Argos, said its stores experienced problems for an hour.

"We are talking to service providers to understand the cause," it added.

A number of financial companies run card payment IT systems for stores in the UK. It is understood not all systems were affected.

Industry group UK Payments says about 11-12 billion is spent on credit cards per month in the UK, and 24bn is spent on debit cards.

Another Twitter user reported: "Sainsbury's on a Saturday - bedlam!"

Greg, from Bangor, County Down, said: "Argos stores are the same - no card payments. Saturday afternoon hell."

Tesco said that, despite rumours, it had no reports of problems with its system.