Thousands of shoppers and football fans were forced back to notes and coins on Tuesday night after a power outage at Worldpay, one of the world’s largest payment processors, knocked out card transactions at pubs, supermarkets and restaurants across the country.

The disruption could hardly have come at a worse moment for the hospitality trade. Tills and contactless terminals began failing just as fans settled in to watch England’s World Cup group game against Ghana, the kind of fixture that turns an ordinary Tuesday into one of the busiest trading nights of the year for licensed venues.

Customers reported being unable to pay by card at a number of retailers, including branches of Tesco, while videos circulating on social media showed queues snaking out of cash machines as drinkers and diners hunted for the funds to settle up. Several pubs and entertainment venues posted notices that they were accepting cash only until the system came back.

Worldpay attributed the fault to a third-party power problem rather than any failure of its own platforms. “The UK experienced a power grid disruption, which is causing intermittent transaction authorisation issues for some Worldpay clients,” a spokesperson said. “Our technical teams are engaged and working to address the matter as soon as possible.”

In a statement on its website, the company added: “A third-party power disruption is causing intermittent transaction authorisation issues and tokenisation request errors on some Worldpay platforms. Our technical teams have restored service to some platforms and continue to troubleshoot to restore full service as soon as possible.”

The monitoring site Downdetector logged more than 1,000 reports of payment problems at Tesco from around 8pm. Responding to a customer on X, the supermarket said: “There is an issue with Worldpay at the moment affecting us and other businesses taking card payments.” A Tesco spokesperson later confirmed the problem had been fixed, saying: “An issue that affected payments in store and online is now resolved. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”

Frustration among consumers focused as much on the timing as the fault itself. “Global outage on Worldpay, leaving busy pubs in the UK unable to sell beer to customers who don’t have cash, not great,” one customer wrote. Another posted: “Unbelievable, busy England game and Worldpay goes down on card terminals. Multiple sectors reporting issues of terminals down.”

For all the inconvenience, the episode is a useful reminder of how thoroughly Britain has moved away from physical money, and how exposed that leaves small firms when the plumbing fails. Contactless now accounts for roughly three-quarters of all debit card transactions in the UK, according to UK Finance data, with supermarkets among the most common places people tap to pay. As Business Matters has reported before, contactless is at record levels and there is little appetite to return to cash.

That convenience comes with concentration risk. When a single processor handling a large share of the market goes dark, the effect ripples instantly across thousands of unrelated businesses, from the corner shop to the national grocer. A pub that has quietly gone card-only over the past few years suddenly cannot take a penny, and few customers now carry the cash to bail it out.

The incident lands against a tougher regulatory backdrop for the firms that run the country’s payment rails. Since March 2025, payment and e-money firms have had to comply with the Financial Conduct Authority’s operational resilience rules, which require them to identify their most important services, set tolerances for how long disruption can last, and prove they can stay within those limits. An outage that stops shops trading on one of the busiest nights of the football calendar is exactly the sort of scenario those rules are designed to stress-test.

For SME owners, the practical lesson is the value of a backup. Venues with a second terminal on a different acquirer, a working cash float or a simple offline payment option were able to keep serving while rivals turned customers away. Many smaller operators have already been rethinking their relationship with the banks’ card machines in search of lower fees and better terms, and resilience deserves a place on that checklist alongside price.

There is a security dimension too. Nights when systems are patchy and queues are long are exactly when staff cut corners and opportunists try their luck, so it pays to understand how to keep cashless customer payments secure even when the technology is under strain.

Worldpay said service had been restored to some platforms within hours and that engineers were working to bring the rest back online. For the publicans who watched a sell-out crowd struggle to buy a round during the second half, the bigger question is not whether the system came back, but how quickly they can make sure the next outage does not cost them the takings.

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