Greggs, the baked goods purveyor made famous for their sausage rolls, have reportedly shut down across the country due to an ongoing IT issue.

After facing card payment issues, stores across the UK were forced to shut down or to go cash only.

A statement from Greggs said: “We are currently experiencing issues accepting payments in our shops,” adding: “We are working to resolve this as soon as possible.”

This follows recent card payment outages across some of the UK’s top grocers, including Tesco’s and Sainsbury’s, as well as an outage affecting McDonald’s franchises across the globe.

Users took to X to show their lament, and the pattern of recent IT outages appears to not be lost on the public.

https://twitter.com/geezerpaulr/status/1770346456077029395

It is currently unclear how far the IT problem has travelled, but so far Cardiff, Manchester, Newcastle, and London have all experienced either closures or cash-only tills at Greggs.

Following the recent IT outages, Ilkka Turunen, Field CTO, Sonatype, gave DIGIT some insight into the potential causes.

“This type of failure is a common occurrence in the world of IT – an update failing and leaving things in an unmanaged state is something everyone with a botched computer update stuck on a loop can relate to,” he said.

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“It’s hard to know what exactly went wrong here but underscores the importance of managing your organisation’s software supply chain in an optimised way. The reality is a lot of this type of work on critical systems is done manually and relies on experienced hero individuals over the weekend.

“This case shows what can happen when not enough attention is paid to effectively managing updates and should be a valuable lesson to all. When combined with the fact critical updates at an industry scale have a low uptake, it underscores the need for organisations to really pay attention and rethink parts of this process. Incidents happen despite any process though and the supermarkets all handled the repercussions pretty swiftly.”

This is a developing story.