PayPoint has apologised after its service suffered a technical issue which affected around one-third of its retail network on Saturday (July 21).

The company, which operates payment terminals in more than 28,000 UK stores, said the issue affected PayPoint transactions for certain retailers and the outage was believed to have been a one off.

A PayPoint spokesman said: “We appreciate that up-time and continuity of service is paramount for a business of our nature and we worked very hard throughout the day to support retailers and to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

“Whilst any interruption of service is significant, the majority of our network remained fully operational throughout the day.”

PayPoint said all services in impacted stores were restored by late afternoon on Saturday. A review of the service is now underway to minimise the risk of an incident happening again.

Satminder Deo, owner of three Spar stores in south Yorkshire, experienced problems at his Wath store.

He said: “Luckily, it only lasted two to three hours and it happened at a quiet time for us so very few customers were affected. We were told by our Epos company that the problem was with Paypoint.

“Similar problems usually happen every three to four months and if it had happened at a busier time it could have affected hundreds of customers that come into our store to use the service.” 

Simon Lunn, owner of Simply Fresh, Axebridge in Somerset, added: “I only heard about the problem when I read the stories online. Fortunately, we don’t get a lot of people using the service in our store so we didn’t notice the disruption.”