- Cyberattack crashes Woolworths checkouts
- Huge queues form in supermarkets
- Customers complain of “absolute chaos”
‘Absolute chaos’ is occurring at Woolworths and 7-Eleven stores across Australia after the supermarket giant fell victim to Microsoft’s global service outage.
Customers are reporting “massive queues” at some stores after a monumental outage affected computers protected by technology produced by antivirus giant Crowdstrike.
At Woolworths, the technology crisis caused many, but not all, point-of-sale payment machines to fail and be unable to process transactions.
A man posted in X, 90% of my premises Woolworth’s wool store The registrations had the (blue screen of death). Queues a kilometer long, absolute chaos. National court? Local?
A Windows recovery screen or ‘BSOD’ at a Woolworths checkout on Friday afternoon as chaos broke out during a cyber outage caused by security firm Cloudstrike
Queues formed outside Woolies supermarket as shoppers were unable to collect their goods and ‘absolute chaos’ ensued
Cloudstrike, which is designed to protect against malware, released a “bad update” on Friday that tech experts say “destroyed” every computer it touched.
The computers crashed and could not be restarted.
A frustrated shopper posts that she has a trolley full of groceries and Woolworths announces over the loudspeaker that they are unable to accept cards at the moment due to a “Microsoft outage” and can only accept cash. What?!
“I hope it works again when it’s over or I’ll be leaving my cart and running to the nearest ATM.”
One shopper wrote: “All the POS machines at my local store and bank have started to fail one by one. I’m wondering if this is a widespread problem.”
On X, @Till_Payments posted ‘#ServiceUpdate: A widespread IT service outage is affecting Australian businesses across the country’ and added a click to get ‘live updates as our team works to resolve the issue’.
Woolworths New Zealand posted a notice on its website suggesting it was unaware of the fact there was a cyber attack, saying: ‘Please wait, our website is working; you are in a virtual queue.
‘There are a lot of people shopping right now, so you’re standing in a virtual queue to get onto the website.
‘To maintain your place in the queue, please keep this window open and do not refresh the page.’
At a supermarket in Redfern, south of Sydney, only one of eight self-service machines was working.
Daily Mail Australia has requested comment from Woolworths.