BP confirmed on Monday that all its sites had returned to normal service and were once again accepting card payments, after the majority were affected by a system failure forcing customers to pay by cash or complete forms to return and pay later.

The system was down for around three hours on Sunday, July 8, affecting around 1,000 of the company’s 1,200 forecourts. Ten sites were temporarily closed, intermittently, to ensure the forecourts were safe from backed up traffic.

A spokesperson for the company said it affected all cards, including fleet cards: “During the outage we directed customers to our on-site cash machines. If credit was still their only option we took their details to collect payment at a later date.”

A full investigation has been launched to determine the cause of the problems; meanwhile BP has issued an apology to its customers for any inconvenience caused.