Recently, you might have noticed, a few of our nations favourite retailers have had ‘tech’ problems and had to shut!
McDonalds, Tesco and Sainsburys all had card payment outages…and then this week gone, on Tuesday, Greggs had to shut!
We have moved to a cashless society… and to be honest, that’s ok. However, we need the systems that support this to ensure they’re reliable, secure and most importantly… available for us to purchase our steak bakes from Greggs!
In 2022, card payments made up 90% of retail spending and racked up £1.3 billion in vendor processing fees, according to the British Retail Consortium.
Adam Pilton, a cyber security consultant at CyberSmart, said the IT outages “should act as a reminder to us in our personal lives and within our business lives of the dependence we place upon technology”.
There is no evidence the technical problems in recent days were caused by cyber attacks – McDonald’s said its global outage was caused by a “third-party provider”.
“One of the key takeaways will be to review the robust back-up systems these retailers have got in place,” said Jenni Matthews, head of marketing and insights at MRI Software.
She added that many people no longer use cash and rely on contactless payments for day-to-day shopping.
“We’re in a day and age where we rely on technology so heavily,” she said.
Whilst all this was going on – I was on my way to the dentist the morning that Greggs was shut… and I thought this needs a tweet…
…and off course, the BBC picked up in my tweet –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68614636
But it wasn’t long before Greggs tweeted…
It’s reminder, how much we use technology… that we should always ensure that a) we’re using it correctly and securely, b) checking that sites and payment methods are secure and finally c) that you do some due diligence on what you’re using and where – for example, do you have old credit cards stored with some retailers, or have you checked your passwords recently and updated them? (Google passwords offer a service where they advice you that a particular password of yours might have been involved in a leak, or used too many times across different platforms, etc…).
So whilst we can all get our sausage rolls again… yes, for the vegans out there, they too are again available…. stay secure.