Card payments outage: Shoppers report issues with Visa and Mastercard

Card payments at major high street shops like Asda, Sainsbury’s, and petrol stations across the UK appeared to crash this morning.

Shoppers reported being unable to pay for their groceries and petrol.

“I’ve just been turned away at Sainsbury’s as they can’t accept card payments,” said Vanessa Meehan, in Twickenham.

“Petrol station also coned off. The car is running on fumes and I need to get supplies.”

The supermarket confirmed contactless payments were “briefly unavailable” this morning but the issue has been resolved.

“This was due to an issue with our third-party payment provider,” said a Sainsbury’s spokesperson to Sky News.

“We’re accepting all payments as usual and continue to monitor the situation. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

A sign in one Sainsbury’s store was requesting customers pay for their shopping in cash.

“Just did a whole shop in @asda, got to the till and told card payments aren’t working across supermarkets/shops in the UK. Does anything work in this country?” posted one X user.

Asda said its payment systems are back up and running following temporary issues with Visa.

A Visa spokesperson confirmed it was aware cardholders are experiencing issues when making payments.

“While Visa’s systems are operating normally, we are working with our partners to investigate,” they added.

More than 600 people reported issues with Visa on DownDetector as of 9.45am on Thursday, while over 100 had problems with Mastercard payments as of 10am.

Mastercard said it was “aware of some payment transaction issues at select merchants in the UK” and was working to gather more information.

“There is no current indication that these issues are related to our network,” a spokesperson said.