‘We’re sorry for the inconvenience’: Woeful weekend as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and McDonald’s suffer IT meltdowns
It’s been an, erm, eventful weekend for UK supermarket big hitters Tesco and Sainsbury’s and US fast food giant McDonald’s.
First up, on Saturday Sainsbury's was hit by an IT meltdown following an 'error with an overnight software update' that prevented the grocery retailer from being able to fulfil online orders and accept contactless payments in stores.
“We're experiencing technical issues affecting some stores, our Groceries Online service and our ability to contact customers. Unfortunately, we will not be able to fulfil the vast majority of today's Groceries Online deliveries,” it said on Twitter.
“We are working hard to fix the issue and apologise to our customers for the inconvenience. We will contact customers proactively to rebook orders as soon as we can.”
It added: “Unfortunately no orders will be going out today. Please book a new delivery from Monday onward. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience. Please bear with us whilst our IT team work tirelessly to resolve this.”
All stores were open as usual albeit operating with some limitations. While chip and PIN and cash transactions were working, Sainsbury’s had issues with contactless and mobile payments.
Shoppers reported problems with using their Nectar cards and the SmartShop app.
One social media user questioned if customer personal data has been impacted by the technical outage.
They were told that shoppers' 'details will still be safe and secure even with the issues going on'.
McDonald’s
McDonald’s, meanwhile, experienced technical problems that brought much of its business to a standstill on Friday.
This happened during a "configuration change" and stopped stores taking orders in the likes of the UK, Australia and Japan.
McDonald’s blamed a "global technology system outage, which was quickly identified and corrected”, and added “notably, this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event - rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change”.
It stressed that this was the "exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it".
Kudos, BTW, to rival Burger King for this response on Twitter (sorry, not sorry, we refuse to call it that other stupid name).
Tesco
Finally, technical issues on Saturday forced Tesco to cancel a small number of online delivery orders.
A spokesperson said: "The vast majority of our online orders are being delivered as normal, but due to a technical issue earlier today we have had to cancel a small number of orders.”
"We are contacting affected customers directly, and we're really sorry for the inconvenience."
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