Technical Meltdown Brings Marks & Spencer to a Standstill
Picture yourself gearing up for an Easter treat—maybe a quick M&S café stop after grabbing an online order. Instead, you find yourself stuck in a sea of shoppers, unable to tap your contactless card or process that return you’ve been meaning to sort for weeks. That’s exactly what played out across Marks & Spencer stores in the UK this past Easter holiday weekend, with the retailer’s systems going haywire starting April 19.
The chaos unfolded just as families and shoppers piled into stores for the long weekend. Outages crashed the contactless payments system, leaving old-school chip-and-PIN transactions as the only real option—if you were lucky. Long queues snaked through food halls and checkouts as some tills struggled to process even these, while café counters went dark, and staff had to turn customers away for returns or gift card purchases. The much-relied-on click-and-collect service ground to a confusing halt, frustrating customers trying to retrieve pre-ordered items.
Online, it was open season for complaints. Social media saw a flood of updates from irate shoppers. One described her wasted trip to Camden, unable to return clothes after making a special journey, while others voiced frustration at discovering the outages only after queuing for ages. Gift card balances couldn’t be checked, and digital returns hit a stone wall as IT outage rippled through the entire business.
Behind the Scenes: What Went Wrong at M&S?
At the heart of the disruption, staff pointed fingers at a widespread Wi-Fi failure that crippled essential retail systems. Without that digital backbone, it wasn’t just sales at risk—delivery logistics, customer refunds, and even basic communications were impacted. Many front-line employees told customers they had little information beyond hastily-posted handwritten signs at tills and entrance doors. The only line of reassurance? An official apology from M&S on social channels, promising that technical teams were working around the clock. But they stopped short of offering even a ballpark estimate for when the tills—and customer tempers—might cool off.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Bank holiday weekends are prime time for shops like M&S to ring up extra business. Instead, shoppers were left standing in line, only to turn around empty-handed. For those banking on a smooth online-to-store experience, the click-and-collect downtime proved especially frustrating, as no backup manual process was rolled out.
What stings more for loyal M&S customers is how familiar this routine is becoming. Less than a year ago, the retailer’s website and app crashed for hours in May 2024, thanks to problems with third-party software providers. That fiasco left online orders in limbo and fans raging on Twitter. Now, customers are left wondering whether these repeated IT outages are a blip or a symptom of deeper problems inside the company’s digital infrastructure.
While the Easter glitch has thrown a harsh spotlight on M&S's tech weaknesses, there’s no escaping the rising stakes as more shoppers rely on contactless payments and digital pickup for convenience. Customers today expect technology to speed up their shopping—not bring it to a halt. As systems grow more complex, even a short burst of downtime can ripple out, hitting sales figures and bruising brand loyalty. Shoppers aren’t just frustrated—they’re wondering if their favorite store can keep up in the hyper-connected age.
