The Financial Post reports in its Thursday, March 23, edition that Shoppers Drug Mart said Wednesday it resolved a computer outage that began Monday night, affecting more than 1,300 locations and preventing customers from paying with debit cards and using the retailer's loyalty points program. An unbylined item in the Post reports that the national pharmacy retail chain, owned by Loblaw, said the outage was caused by a network failure that impeded stores from connecting to internal and external systems. Shoppers spokesman Tammy Smitham said all of its stores started experiencing "intermittent" technical difficulties Monday night and the problems continued into Wednesday morning. "I think we may have experienced issues with payment systems in the past but this was a connectivity issue that affected multiple systems," she said. During the outage, customers were still able to pay for purchases with cash and credit card payments of up to $300 but were unable to collect or redeem Shoppers Optimum points. Some stores were unable to fill drug prescriptions because they could not electronically access patient files. Others filled orders manually.