Small businesses are complaining that they have lost money from sales after an outage caused card payments to fail across the UK on Thursday.

Retailers and wholesalers were urgently seeking support from providers after complaining that they could not take payments from customers during the morning.

Lloyds, NatWest and other payments firms have apologised to customers after saying their services were caught up in the industry-wide issues.

The problems are understood to have stemmed from global payments company Fiserv.

One drinks and confectionery supplier took to X, formerly Twitter, to say it had lost “several hundred pounds in sales” as a result of the outage, asking for help from Lloyds which runs card payment service Cardnet.

Other users said they had been unable to take any payments, including an indoor karting centre and an electrical wholesaler.

Cafe and market stall operator Hoxton Beach said businesses were losing money after the outage left it unable to accept payments through card machines.

Lloyds apologised to customers for the “industry-wide issue” affecting its services and said “work is under way” to fix the issues.

A spokesman for NatWest, which runs the Tyl payment system for businesses, said its services had now returned to normal.

“We’re aware of a third-party issue that meant some users of our merchant card service were unable to take payments this morning,” the bank said.

“We’re sorry for the inconvenience and can confirm that service has been restored.”

Tyl customers, including a furniture retailer and a sound system seller, were asking for support and compensation after complaining that they had lost sales over the card payment problems.

An Oxfordshire-based chocolaterie said it could not take payments on Thursday morning and had been unable to reach NatWest’s customer support team.

Paymentsense, which provides card machines for businesses, said it was “aware of an issue with a third party which is preventing some Paymentsense customers from transacting”.

It said it was working on the issue “urgently to get everything back up and running”.