by STAMFORD, Conn. — Some furniture retailers using Synchrony Financial to approve credit and process transactions were out of luck for at least part of the day Saturday, as the consumer financial services company experienced an unexpected interruption in service.
The good news: This was not another cyberattack on the industry or its partners. The bad news: The glitch shut things down on what’s typically the busiest day of the week for most stores.
“Their systems have been down this weekend, meaning we cannot process applications and we cannot make transactions using their service,” one retailer told Home News Now Sunday morning. “It also means the consumers can’t access their accounts or make their payments. The only communication we get is that they are “down for maintenance,” with no information regarding what happened, what is affected, and how long it is going to last.”
The retailer confirmed systems were back up for his store by Sunday afternoon.
Responding to an inquiries from HNN, a spokesperson for Synchrony said the company experienced “some technology interruptions across various customer channels,” during routine maintenance, and that “our IT teams worked hard to restore the systems within hours.”
“As of Sunday morning our customer applications and servicing tools were restored,” she said. This was an operational issue, and we can confirm that this is not cyber related.”
She did not offer additional details on the extent of the interruption including the number of businesses impacted.
One of them was Franklin Furnace, Ohio-based Big Sandy Superstore, CEO Robert VanHoose. confirmed Monday. He said this had never happened before, and especially not on a busy Saturday.
It’s just a bad customer experience,” VanHoose said. “On top of telling people they have to wait on product (because of ongoing delays), we had to tell them you can’t get your credit approved, either. It just didn’t look good.”
VanHoose didn’t didn’t say how much business his stores may have lost as a result, but estimated about 5% of the consumers who couldn’t complete their transaction or complete the credit application, weren’t likely to come back anytime soon.
“It wasn’t the end of the world. If people really wanted it, we found a way to work around it, but we had to scramble.”
