IT outages at Greggs ‘resolved’ after stores forced to close

The issue meant shops were unable to accept payments.

Some branches of Greggs had to closed as they could not process payments (Sam Russell/PA) (PA Wire)

Technical problems which forced Greggs stores across the UK to close on Wednesday morning have been resolved, the bakery chain said.

The IT outages prevented payments from being accepted and the issue affected branches nationwide, including in London, Sheffield and Birmingham.

Some stores put up temporary “closed” notices on their doors, others were only able to accept cash payments, and some told customers to order outside on the Greggs mobile app before their food could be given to them.

Later in the morning, Greggs said the “majority of shops affected are now able to take card and cash payments again” and it soon expects the issue to be fully resolved.

A Greggs spokesperson said: “We have now resolved the technical issue that affected tills in some of our shops earlier this morning.

“We apologise for the inconvenience this may have caused to our customers.”

Greggs operates more than 2,450 shops across the UK, though it is unclear how many were affected by the technical problems.

The popular bakery chain was the most recent of several retailers to suffer problems with their payments systems.

On Saturday, outages to payment systems prevented Sainsbury’s stores across the country from accepting contactless card payments and issuing home deliveries, while Tesco was also hit by technical issues which meant it had to cancel some online orders that were due for delivery.

McDonald’s suffered a “global technology system outage” on Friday, which the fast-food chain said had not been “directly caused by a cybersecurity event”.