Folks grabbing a Thursday morning coffee and bite at Philadelphia-area Wawas got a surprise at checkout -- cash only.
The convenience store chain confirmed to NBC10 on Sept. 12, 2024, that they were only accepting cash "at some, if not all of our stores" over more than a 2-hour period from 7:15 am ET to around 9:30 p.m. ET.
"We have been notified by our credit card processor they are currently experiencing issues impacting our ability to accept credit transactions at some, if not all of our stores and are working to resolve it," Wawa spokesperson Jennifer Wolf said while confirming the outage. "We are temporarily accepting only cash transactions while they work to resolve the issue."
NBC10 had reached out to Wawa after hearing of payment issues at stores in Philadelphia and Chester County. One X user based in Florida reported that a person on a loudspeaker at their store said more than 100 stations were impacted.
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I walked into my favorite WAWA station to get my morning cup of coffee. The person over the loud speaker said that over 100+ stations had no "internet/credit card ability". Cash only. Is the Microsoft Outage a possible culprit? #Microsoft #outage
— augiworld (@Augiworld_org) September 12, 2024
The credit payment outage didn't make its way into the afternoon.
"We experienced a chain wide credit/debit processing outage that impacted most if not all of our stores this morning from approximately 7:15 – 9:30 am," Wawa spokesperson Lori Bruce said. "...The problem has been resolved and credit/debit is back to normal."
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Still no word on what may have led to the payment problems. Wawa didn't give an exact number of stores impacted.
"The issue appears to have impacted other retailers in addition to Wawa," Bruce said. "We do not have details on the cause at this time."
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