SPAR has been forced to close more than 300 stores for a 2nd day after being subject to by a cyber-attack.
The stores shut their doors on Sun. after they were unable to take card payments.
However, the online attack still has not been resolved – with 330 Spar stores across the North of England remaining closed.
The website for Preston food distributor James Hall & Co. is still crashed.
Statement
A Spar spokesperson stated “At James Hall we are currently aware of an online attack on our IT systems.
“This has affected around 330 Spar stores across the North of England over the past 24 hours & we are working to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.
“It is currently impacting stores’ ability to process card payments meaning that a number of Spar stores are currently closed to shoppers or only taking cash payments.
Inconvenience
“We apologise for the inconvenience this is causing our customers & we are working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation.”
It is not clear how long the outage will last – with 1 store admitting it could be “10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days”.
They added: “Due to a major & widespread IT failure across the entire Northern Spar network, all Northern Spar stores will be closed for an unknown period of time.
Our Staff Cannot Open
“We will update when we know more, but in the meantime please understand that our staff cannot open until the systems are restored.”
As well as credit card machines, the problem is also affecting tills & office systems.
Prior to a trip to your local Spar, you might want to check ahead to see if it’s still open.
Check with the shop’s locator tool to find out when your closest one is.
Spar is not the only retailer to have been affected by hacks of late.
Tesco’s Website
Tesco’s website & app went down in Oct. following what was thought to be an alleged hack on the supermarket’s sites.
100s of shoppers could not order their groceries online or update pre-arranged deliveries.
While in July, a mass outage meant banks, streaming sites & retailer’s websites went down in what was thought to be a cyber-attack – but reportedly wasn’t.
