Spar has been forced to close all of its Northern branches after a cyber attack which caused a “major & widespread IT failure across the entire Northern Spar network”.
The supermarket announced on its Facebook page on Sunday that its IT systems had gone down following the attack.
“All Northern Spar stores will be closed for an unknown period of time. We will update when we know more, but in the meantime please understand that our staff cannot open until the systems are restored. At this stage no-one knows if that will be 10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days,” The page announced.
At 10:30am, the store’s page added that the systems were still down and would be for a further two hours, apologising for the inconvenience.
The store later said that it was trialling a “possible solution” at a number of stores in a controlled manner to “ensure it is a robust solution prior to rollout to other stores.”
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The final announcement from the shop was that it had made the decision to close all of its northern stores.
“We have finally had to make the difficult decision to close our stores for the day and let the staff go home.
Our latest information is that while a solution is being worked on round the clock and through the night, still no timescale can be given as to when this might considered robust enough to be rolled out to stores.
“We sincerely hope that we wake up tomorrow to better news. We will endeavour to keep our customers updated through social media.
“Please feel free to share these posts to spread the word and avoid wasted journeys. We can only offer our sincerest apologies for not being able to be #thereforyou but hope you understand that this is entirely out of our control. Thank you”
