Worldpay Outage Disrupts Card Payments During England Match

A technology outage at Worldpay left thousands of UK consumers unable to make card payments on one of the busiest evenings of the summer, disrupting transactions at supermarkets, pubs and retailers as England faced Ghana in the FIFA World Cup.

Worldpay Outage Disrupts Payments 

The incident, which occurred last Tuesday evening, triggered a surge of reports on Downdetector as consumers experienced problems with contactless payments. Several pubs and bars took to social media to inform customers they could only accept cash, while videos posted online showed queues forming at cash machines as football fans scrambled to withdraw money before kick-off.

Power Disruption Hits Payment Processing

Worldpay attributed the disruption to a third-party power outage that affected parts of its payment infrastructure.

In a statement issued during the incident, the company said: “A third-party power disruption is causing intermittent transaction authorisation issues and tokenisation request errors on some Worldpay platforms.”

The payments processor later confirmed that technical teams had restored services and that transaction authorisations were once again operating normally.

Tesco also confirmed that intermittent issues affecting digital payments had been resolved following the outage.

Busy Trading Night Highlights Importance of Resilience

The disruption came at a particularly costly moment for the hospitality sector. According to transaction data released by Clover, a Fiserv company, England’s opening World Cup fixture against Croatia generated a 91 per cent increase in transaction volumes across pubs and bars, with spending peaking at more than 230 per cent above normal levels during the second half of the match.

Against that backdrop, any interruption to payment acceptance risks translating directly into lost sales, particularly as many consumers now rely almost exclusively on contactless cards and digital wallets.

Scott Dawson, Chief Executive of payments firm Decta, said major sporting events expose the commercial consequences of even brief outages, noting that every failed transaction represents potential lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction.

Pressure Grows for More Resilient Payments Infrastructure

The incident is the latest in a series of high-profile payment disruptions to focus attention on operational resilience across the payments industry.

As digital payments continue to replace cash, merchants are becoming increasingly dependent on always-available payment infrastructure. Recent incidents, including widespread power outages affecting payment systems in Spain and Portugal last year, have reinforced calls for greater redundancy, improved failover capabilities and wider support for offline payment functionality.

While outages remain relatively rare, Tuesday’s disruption demonstrates how quickly operational issues can affect both merchants and consumers. As electronic payments become the default choice for everyday spending, ensuring continuous payment availability is becoming as important as processing transactions securely and efficiently.