The Lemon Fool

Wasn't sure where to post this, but thought it probably wasn't a DAK as most answers will like speculative.

McDonald's, Greggs, Sainsbury's and Tesco have all suffered rather embarrassing tech failures affecting both card payments and online deliveries.

It seems more than a coincidence and perhaps not surprising that none of the parties are saying much, but I wonder if maybe Putin or perhaps the Chinese might be behind some sort of orchestrated hacking campaign.

Has anyone with their ear to the ground heard anything, or does anyone have any inside info about these issues, or is it just coincidence?

staffordian wrote:Has anyone with their ear to the ground heard anything, or does anyone have any inside info about these issues, or is it just coincidence?

I haven't heard anything, but a third option is that some or all the issues could be related to a fault in a common bit of infrastructure/code like a link to a card payment system, or credit reference agency, or one of the complex set of interlinks that online systems use these days.

Scott.

staffordian wrote:Wasn't sure where to post this, but thought it probably wasn't a DAK as most answers will like speculative.

McDonald's, Greggs, Sainsbury's and Tesco have all suffered rather embarrassing tech failures affecting both card payments and online deliveries.

It seems more than a coincidence and perhaps not surprising that none of the parties are saying much, but I wonder if maybe Putin or perhaps the Chinese might be behind some sort of orchestrated hacking campaign.

Has anyone with their ear to the ground heard anything, or does anyone have any inside info about these issues, or is it just coincidence?

'Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action'

But don't discount the fact that many of these companies are using the same backend payments systems/software as each other. All it takes is for one of those to have a glitch for many brands to have the same glitch. My other half works in payments for a large retailer; the number of dependencies that all have to be right is frightening (but well remunerated).
The silence of the brands is as likely to do with it being a third-party problem.

Yes, I wondered about a related 'back-end' problem, but thought that had that been the case, the issues would have occurred at the same time. But thinking more about it, maybe updates by the retailers to conform to third party requirements were simply scheduled for different times.

Much as Putin et al would love to claim responsibility to show how powerful they are, like the others I think it's probably just a mundane failure of a third party cog in the logistics wheel. Although it does highlight the issues around concentration of resources into a few very big hands.

Back in the eighties when I worked in retail we had paper till sheets for when single till shops had issues, had to use them a couple of times after power cuts/dodgy tills.
Likewise when chip and pin came in the smarter retailers kept the old carbon paper swipe machines for CC/DC and a box of carbons 'just in case'...

One oddity was that the problems were patchy. Our local Sainsburys was still managing chip and pin card transactions on a day when many other branches around the country weren't. (Contactless, however, seemed to be out in all stores, unless somebody here knows differently?)

I gather that phone payments were working at our local store. But the cashpoints had all been cleaned out by nervous shoppers. Where's a good old twenty pound note when you need one?

Maybe payment systems are updated on a rolling basis? Certainly, Greggs went down a full four days after the others.

BJ

It's a strange one. Similar "outages" but at different times. A common processing source having issues would surely affect all client businesses at the same time. And if it was a rollout of a bad release from such a common source to multiple clients over time then I would expect the rollout to be paused following initial failures.
Possibly a rogue actor having gained access to the processing capability and is going round disabling clients should they not pay a ransom ? Could be, but that doesn't seem right to me.

bungeejumper wrote:One oddity was that the problems were patchy. Our local Sainsburys was still managing chip and pin card transactions on a day when many other branches around the country weren't. (Contactless, however, seemed to be out in all stores, unless somebody here knows differently?)

My understanding was that the message from Sainsbury HQ was - chip/PIN fine, contactless not fine, across the country. So it may just have been individual stores believing the media hype of "cards don't work at all", or having their own reasons for saying no to chip/PIN as well - maybe particular hardware that couldn't cope with contactless being down, or they just didn't want the grief of trying to explain to people that they had to use actual cards with PINs rather than waving their watches etc.