The payments crisis at Greggs, Sainsbury’s and Tesco is leading to an urgent investigation from the watchdog

A series of IT problems that took sales offline at four major retailers are now being investigated by a payments watchdog.

The digital disruptions affected heavyweights Sainsbury’s, Greggs, McDonald’s and Tesco.

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The problem concerns payment terminals and cash registers that were not working, which has caused problems at all four retailers in recent weeks.

As a result, the Payments Systems Regulator (PSR) has said it will now investigate the outages over the past week.

Major payment systems such as Mastercard, Visa and the Faster Payments scheme are being monitored by the watchdog, which will notify the Bank of England if they spot an issue relating to the resilience of the payments infrastructure.

Throughout the investigation, they will decide whether further action is necessary, as there are concerns that this could be an indication that the payment infrastructure is not resilient enough, reports the Telegraph.

The PSR is reportedly communicating with the mega-corporations affected, as well as liaising with the Bank of England.

The technical check comes as many retailers now refuse to accept cash. This means that a nationwide payment disruption could have serious consequences if the country continues to opt for digital-only payments.

According to British financeBetween 2012 and 2022, cash payments fell from 54 percent to just 14 percent, and the list of digital-only stores continues to grow.

Earlier this week, bakery giant Greggs suffered an IT glitch that shut down hundreds of tills, and Brits across the country were not holding back with complaints on social media.

The issue forced Greggs to close some of its branches, which they blamed on a “technical issue”, later claiming the problem had been resolved.

Concerns have been raised that it could be a wider problem as McDonald’s suffered the same fate last week and had to close a number of their restaurants.

At the time they said it was caused by a third party provider during a ‘configuration change’.

In addition, Sainsbury’s and Tesco struggled with their delivery services and payment processing.

A spokesperson for the Payments Systems Regulator said: “The PSR is aware of the recent payment issues and is assessing their nature to determine whether further action is required.”

Experts have yet to discover a link between the series of incidents, but there are suspicions that a software update from a shared provider is the cause of the payment freeze problem.

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The industry’s leading theory – according to one payments consultant – relates to third-party ‘electronic point of sale’ (EPOS) software, which records orders by linking inventory management to payments.

The system regularly handles barcode scanning, which could explain why supermarkets have struggled to process and box items ready to be delivered to customers.

Fortunately, security specialists have said that this is unlikely to be the result of cyber attacks on the affected companies.

Cybersecurity expert Alan Woodward explained that while it looks like a simple mistake, it shows how “vulnerable” the payments infrastructure is and “potentially” shows what would happen if a hacker were to enter the “supply chain.”

This comes after Tesco’s contactless payment system “went down” on February 3 and shoppers complained of huge queues and “absolute carnage”.

More than 400 users reported problems with the usually convenient contactless payments at Tesco stores.

And irritated users rushed to X, formerly Twitter, to express their anger.

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