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Tens of thousands of clients at two leading banks were left unable to use their card for purchases or to withdraw cash on Saturday, August 30, after a major outage disrupted Cr茅dit Mutuel and CIC services across France.

The outage began shortly after 17:00 and lasted for more than two hours, affecting card transactions in supermarkets, petrol stations and other outlets. 

The issue was resolved by 19:30, the bank confirmed.

The incident was attributed to the failure of the transaction verification system affecting card payments and cash withdrawals across 16 regional banking federations, according to Cr茅dit Mutuel, 

鈥淭his is not unprecedented in the banking sector, but it is the first time it has affected our group,鈥� the spokesperson said. 

The bank, which has 14 million clients, apologised for the disruption and said the cause 鈥渉ad been identified and resolved thanks to the mobilisation of our IT teams鈥�.

The scale of the problem was evident on monitoring platform Downdetector, which recorded more than 5,200 reports of outages for Cr茅dit Mutuel and nearly 3,000 for CIC by 20:30 on Saturday.

鈥淏y 18:00, our teams had identified the cause of the incident and begun work to resolve it,鈥� the spokesperson said.

The interruption had immediate consequences for customers at tills and service points. 

Local media reported queues at petrol stations and abandoned shopping baskets in supermarkets. 

鈥淭he payment was refused several times. Some clients simply left as they could not pay. It was chaos,鈥� one customer told Ouest-France.

On social media, complaints multiplied, many highlighting the timing of the outage only days before the rentr茅e. 

Users questioned the lack of real-time information from the banks while payments were blocked.

Cr茅dit Mutuel insisted that services were restored fully on Saturday evening and stressed that the incident did not involve a cyberattack. 

The group said it would review procedures to avoid a repeat of the failure.