Tesco the latest UK supermarket giant to be hit with tech issues
Supermarket giant Tesco has apologised to customers for technical issues. On Friday 16 May, social media was flooded with complaints from customers who were not able to complete their online shopping, add items to a basket, or use their Tesco club card.
Tesco acknowedged the issues in a message on social media, noting that it IT team was aware of the ‘intermittent system issues’ and that it was working hard to resolve them. A spokesperson confirmed to the BBC that the issues had been software related and have now hopefully been resolved.
The incident, which appears to be fairly benign, caps off a month of technical woes for the country’s largest supermarkets which included technical hacks and widespread outages.
Notably, Marks and Spencer (M&S) and the Co-op suffered massive outages in recent weeks as the result of a cybersecurity incident. While the full technical details remain under investigation, early reports suggests that cyber attackers used this method to access M&S internal systems, possibly by taking control of an employee’s mobile number and convincing IT staff to reset critical login credentials.
The attack has forced the company to suspend online orders, led to shortages on shelves, increased working demands on staff, and wiped £750m off the share value. Three weeks later, there is still no indication of when these disruptions will end and when M&S will be able to return to business as usual.
“While we do not yet know all the facts of the recent M&S cyber-attacks, they have provided yet another example of the costs of a business-as-usual approach to cybersecurity,” said researchers at the University of Oxford.
“In today’s digitally-dependent world, cyber resilience should not be seen as an ideal, but as an organisational imperative. Businesses must assume that they will be the next victim of a significant cyber incident, and leaders should act to prepare for, absorb, respond to, and learn from incidents accordingly. If they do not, then it is only a matter of when they will be the next cautionary headline, not if.”
