Sainsbury's apologises after card payment issues

Sainsbury's has fixed a glitch with its payment system which affected some same-day deliveries and shop purchases.

The UK's second largest supermarket said the issue had been intermittent since Thursday morning but has now been entirely resolved.

Complaints by customers on social media indicated widespread frustration at the faulty card terminals.

One person said that shopping was being abandoned in stores after people were unable to pay. Some shops were only taking cash as a result.

Stores affected included major cities such as Manchester and Birmingham, with some people posting images of signs reading "Cash Only, No Contactless".

It is unclear how many shops overall were hit by the outage.

A spokesperson for Sainsbury’s, said: “We have fixed a network issue which intermittently affected Smart Shop, some card payments in our stores and some of our same day delivery orders yesterday.

"We're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused, thank you for bearing with us.”

The Sainsbury's SmartShop app allows customers to scan items as they shop to reduce checkout wait times.

In March, Sainsbury's suffered more technical problems when an overnight software update error left stores unable to take contactless payments.

At the time, weekend home deliveries were affected.