Supermarket giant Asda has said sorry to customers after a major problem with card machines led to huge delays at the tills.
Shoppers immediately took to social media to complain about having to stand in large queues as they tried to purchase their groceries.
Asda has now issued an apology and said it has solved the problem in most of its stores.
Issues with card machines across a number of stores led to cashiers either having to use old-fashioned card-readers where customers must sign a slip, or saying that they were accepting cash only.
The issue came the day clocks went back an hour in the UK for autumn.
However, shopper Gordon Carr from Gateshead, tweeted: “Thanks very much Asda, I have lost my extra hour today waiting at Boldon store as tills stopped working! 45 minutes with no explanation.”
Another shopper said there was no back up system in place and customers were simply left standing “like cattle” waiting for the issue to be resolved.
Yet another tweeted: “Longest food shop ever thanks to Asda. No apology for having to wait in a queue for over an hour.”
Customers in many stores were asked to go outside to draw cash out from ATM machines before coming back to do their shopping. But that simply seemed to cause similar queues at the ATMs as customers tried to withdraw cash, with some cash machines running out of money because of the demand.
Some shoppers were reporting that they had spent an hour simply trying to pay for their goods. Others were saying they gave up after waiting long periods of time.
A spokeswoman for Asda said: “We’re continuing to process payments as quickly as we can but apologise to our customers for the inconvenience this has caused.”
The crash happened on a particularly busy day at Asda stores. While many shoppers were stopping at the store to buy goods for their Sunday roast, others were picking up last minute Halloween goodies or items needed as the school goes back after half term.
The Leeds-headquartered store is a wholly owned division of US firm Walmart.
Problems appeared to have been solved in most of the stores affected a short time before stores closed at their regular Sunday trading time of 4pm. Teams of technology staff will now be working to fix issues in other stores through the night before they reopen.
