Card payments outage hits pubs and shops during England match

Customers report having to use cash at stores such as Tesco and to buy drinks due to outage at payments processor WorldPay

Shoppers reported problems with making card payments at British pubs and supermarkets on Tuesday after a power outage affected one of the world’s largest payment processing platforms.

Customers said contactless payments were not working at a number of stores including Tesco branches at a time when football fans were watching the World Cup group game between England and Ghana at pubs, screenings and restaurants.

Videos circulating on social media showed long queues outside cash machines.

The issue is due to a power outage affecting Worldpay, a payment processing company. A Worldpay spokesperson said: “The UK experienced a power grid disruption, which is causing intermittent transaction authorization issues for some Worldpay clients.

“Our technical teams are engaged and working to address the matter as soon as possible.”

Worldpay said on its website: “A third-party power disruption is causing intermittent transaction authorization issues and tokenization requests errors on some Worldpay platforms.

“Our technical teams have restored service to some platforms and continue to troubleshoot to restore full service as soon as possible. “

Monitoring website Downdetector indicated customers were experiencing problems with making payments at Tesco, with more than 1,000 reports of issues since 8pm.

In a response to a customer complaint on X, Tesco said: “There is an issue with Worldpay at the moment affecting us and other businesses taking card payments.”

Some pubs and entertainment venues announced on social media that they were only accepting cash payments due to the issues.

Consumers on social media voiced their frustration at the timing of the power outage.

One wrote: “Global outage on @Worldpay_Global- leaving busy pubs in the UK unable to sell beer to customers who don’t have cash … not great.”

Another wrote on X: “Unbelievable … busy England game and World Pay goes down on card terminals … Multiple sectors reporting issues of terminals down.”

A Tesco spokesperson said: “An issue that affected payments in store and online is now resolved. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”