Macy’s credit card processors stop working on Black Friday

It’s one of the biggest shopping days of the year, but retail giant Macy’s can’t get its credit card processors to work.

Customers have been waiting in lines across the United States to buy discounted items, only to find out that the machines won’t take credit cards or gift cards. Some Bloomingdale’s stores, which are owned by Macy’s, may have also been impacted.

Update: The company says it has resolved the issue and has provided the following statement.

“We have fully resolved today’s system issues. We highly value our customers and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience today’s system slowdown may have caused during their shopping experience. The delays we experienced this afternoon were due to a capacity-related issue that caused some transactions to take longer to process. We do not anticipate any additional delays.”

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, has become a shopping holiday, with retailers offering heavily discounted items. Macy’s even kicks off the occasion with its big annual Thanksgiving parade in New York, which is televised throughout the country.

The company also experienced an outage on its website during Black Friday 2016. Holiday sales play a significant role in the company’s quarterly earnings and Macy’s disappointed Wall Street last season.

Its stock is trading at less than half of what it was a year ago and about one-third of what it was three years ago. The company presently has a market cap of $6.4 billion.

Last year, Terry Lundgren, who was Macy’s CEO at the time, said in an interview with Fortune that the company started opening its stores earlier on Thanksgiving Day because of industry pressure. “If you’re not open and your competitors are, there’s going to be a number of customers who simply will go shop elsewhere,” he told Fortune. “You’ll never recover that sale.”

Lundgren is now executive chairman.  Jeff Gennette took on the role of CEO in March, after being promoted from president.

Gennette told CNBC earlier Friday that Black Friday was off to a stronger start than last year.He said that the company had fewer discounts this year, which would lead to better profit margins.

According to the National Retail Federation, 164 million Americans planned to shop during Thanksgiving weekend.

Featured Image: Alexander Scheuber/Getty Images