The Payments Systems Regulator (PSR) on Thursday said that it had launched an urgent review into a series of high-profile retail outages that have occurred in recent days.

Supermarket chains Tesco and Sainsbury’s suffered issues surrounding its payment processing and delivery systems on Saturday, while Greggs and McDonald’s both had to close physical stores due to payment outages.

The PSR said that it was communicating with the companies and the Bank of England over the failures, and that it would use the review as an opportunity to assess whether further action was needed regarding payments infrastructure resilience.

A spokesperson for the PSR, which monitors payment systems in the UK, told the Telegraph: “The PSR is aware of the recent payment issues and is assessing their nature to determine whether any further action is needed.”

No actors have claimed to be behind the series of outages, with McDonald’s saying its downtime was “caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change”. Its business was impacted in the UK and further afield in markets including Japan and Australia.

Greggs meanwhile apologised to customers following Wednesday’s outage which meant many of its stores could not even accept cash due to a “technical issue” with its payments system.

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