Albert Heijn has suspended online grocery deliveries in Belgium and the Netherlands after an Albert Heijn IT incident took down its website, app and logistics systems. The Dutch supermarket chain says deliveries are on hold until further notice, and it has not said when its systems will return.
The Albert Heijn IT incident began on Sunday afternoon, 11 October. According to the company, it switched off several systems itself as soon as it detected the problem, including the ones that run its logistics. Albert Heijn describes that step as a way to protect its IT environment. Sister brands Etos and Gall & Gall also have problems.
What still works in stores
Physical supermarkets remain open, and the checkout systems work. However, shelf labels still show last week’s prices, so customers will not see the latest promotional prices in the aisles. The bonus offers from the current flyer do apply at the till, according to Belgian tech site ITdaily.
Loyalty and savings programmes are down. Albert Heijn advises shoppers to keep their receipts so they can claim compensation later. Customers also cannot reach the customer service line.
In a statement, the chain said: “Our logistics systems have been temporarily switched off, which means we cannot deliver groceries ordered online until further notice.”
Customer data status after the Albert Heijn IT incident
Albert Heijn’s IT teams are still investigating what happened. The company says it takes the protection of customer data seriously, but it has not confirmed that customer data is safe. It also has no timeline for restoring service.
Albert Heijn has not described the nature of the incident. Meanwhile, ITdaily, which first reported the outage, considers a cyberattack the most likely explanation. Because the website and app load but do not function, the outlet rules out a denial-of-service attack. Instead, it concludes that attackers probably got inside the company’s systems.
The scale of any damage depends on how quickly Albert Heijn spotted the breach, which systems the attackers reached and whether they viewed or stole any data. Still, the decision to take customer service, deliveries, in-store logistics and the websites offline points to a serious incident, ITdaily notes.
Second major incident for Ahold Delhaize
Albert Heijn belongs to Ahold Delhaize, but the outage does not reach every brand in the group. For example, the online services of Delhaize stores in Belgium currently work as normal.
The group has dealt with a breach before. In August, hackers broke into the systems of Bol.com and De Bijenkorf, and they may have stolen customer data from both retailers. Bol.com is also part of Ahold Delhaize, so the Albert Heijn IT incident is the holding’s second major cyber incident in a short span.
Other Belgian organisations have also faced attacks in recent weeks. Hackers stole the personal data of 700,000 people from IFAPME, a training network in Wallonia.