Bolt Food customers were left confused on Friday night after an apparent glitch with the service's mobile app led to some people receiving food deliveries hours after their apparently unsuccessful order attempts.

Customers said they were charged money for food orders they assumed had not gone through due to problems with the app at the time of ordering.

But the company quickly acted to issue refunds to anyone charged as a result of the glitch, customers who spoke to Times of Malta said. 

Many other customers were unable to place any orders at all, and were instead shown an error message informing them that deliveries were temporarily paused due to technical issues.

The issue appeared to affect the app for around four hours.

One Bolt Food customer said he ordered from McDonald's in Birkirkara at around 8pm, paid for the order, “but then the app glitched and it looked like the order had been cancelled.”

With the app not working as expected and his Revolut payment showing as pending, he tried calling the fast-food outlet to check what was happening but couldn’t get through by phone.

A screenshot of the Bolt app taken at around 9:30pm on Friday night.

So, he decided to visit the outlet in person, where he was told the order had not been received. The customer placed an order in person, paid and took the food home himself. 

But at around 10pm, he received a message from a Bolt Food courier informing him he was outside with his order, with his card payment taken at around the same time.

“Even the courier said there were issues last night; he said the Bolt system had gone down for around four hours,” said the customer, who asked not to be named.

He added that he refused the order, and the value of the order was credited to his Bolt account on Saturday morning.

He was not the only customer to face issues.

Numerous Facebook users posting in popular group ‘Are You Being Served? (Malta & Gozo) Original’ indicated they had also encountered the same issue, with one woman saying she had resorted to sending a taxi to a restaurant to pick up her order instead.

Several Facebook users said they had received orders only after 10pm.

A handful of other said they also experienced problems when ordering on Bolt's rival Wolt on Friday night. 

Questions were sent to Bolt and Wolt.