- Cyber attack causes cash registers at Woolworths to crash
- Huge lines form outside supermarkets
- Customers complain of ‘absolute chaos’
There is “absolute chaos” at Woolworths and 7-Eleven stores across Australia as the supermarket giant falls victim to Microsoft’s global outage.
Customers are reporting ‘huge queues’ at some stores after a massive outage hit computers protected by technology from antivirus giant Crowdstrike.
At Woolworths, the technology crisis caused many, but not all, cash registers to fail and no longer process transactions.
One man posted on X, ‘90% of my local Wolworths registers had the (blue screen of death). Lines a mile long, absolute chaos. National outage? Local?’
A Windows recovery screen or ‘BSOD’ at a Woolworths checkout on Friday afternoon as chaos ensued during a cyber outage caused by security firm Cloudstrike
Queues formed outside Woolies supermarket as customers were unable to pay for their goods, causing ‘absolute chaos’
Cloudstrike, which is designed to protect against malware, released a “bad update” on Friday that technology experts said “nuked” every computer it came into contact with.
Computers crashed and could not be restarted.
A frustrated female shopper posted that she had a ‘trolley full of groceries’ and Woolworths announced over the loudspeaker that they are currently unable to accept debit cards due to a ‘Microsoft outage’ and can only accept cash. Huh?!!
‘I hope everything will be working again by the time I’m done, otherwise I’ll have to ditch my cart and run to the nearest ATM.’
A male customer wrote: ‘All the POS machines at my local one by one have been crashing. I’m wondering if this is a widespread problem?’
On X, @Till_Payments posted the message ‘#ServiceUpdate: Large-scale IT outage impacting Australian businesses across the country.’ It also added a click for ‘live updates as our team works to resolve the issue.’
Woolworths New Zealand posted a message on its website saying it was unaware of the cyberattack. It said: ‘Please wait, our website is working – you are just in a virtual queue.’
‘There are a lot of people shopping right now, so you are in a virtual queue to enter the website.
‘To keep your place in the queue, keep this window open and do not refresh the page.’
At a supermarket in Redfern, in Sydney’s south, only one of eight self-service machines was working.
Daily Mail Australia has reached out to Woolworths for comment.