Checkout machines at retail giant Target were unusable for nearly two hours on Sunday, due to an issue at a data center.

The unidentified problem with a facility used by vendor NCR caused the downtime, Target said, but added that the issue was unrelated to a point-of-sale machine outage on Saturday. That time, the failure was caused by an error made during regular system maintenance.

Shop till it drops

"Like many other companies, Target uses NCR as a vendor to help accept payments, and on Sunday afternoon NCR experienced an issue at one of their data centers," Target spokesperson Jenna Reck said in a statement.

"While this was not an issue within Target’s technology system, Target was unable to process select card payments at some stores for about 90 minutes. The issue is now resolved and payments are going through normally. Additionally, we can confirm that this was not a security-related issue and no payment information was compromised at any time.

"Although this was unrelated to Saturday’s issue, we know many guests had a frustrating shopping experience in our stores this weekend. For that, we are truly sorry. We never want to disappoint any guests and we’re working tirelessly to ensure these issues don’t happen again."

DCD has contacted NCR for further details about the specifics of the issue. Its corporate website lists three US data centers, one in Ashburn that appears to be a RagingWire facility; one in Westlake Village, California, that appears to share a building with call tracking company CallSource; and one in Dayton, Ohio that is its own data center.

Target operates 1,800 stores in the US, and has a presence in India.