Dive Brief:
- The websites and apps for Ahold Delhaize’s five U.S. banners remain unavailable Wednesday morning, marking at least the third day the digital platforms have been offline. A handful of Ahold Delhaize’s dozen international banners — Albert Heijn, Etos and Gall & Gall — have also been down since at least Monday.
- The five U.S. banner websites show a message saying that customers with unfulfilled online orders will receive refunds. The notices also tell shoppers to contact their local pharmacies for questions about prescriptions and that stores and pharmacies are operating under normal business hours.
- The website outages come as Ahold Delhaize contends with a cybersecurity incident. On Tuesday, the company said an investigation is ongoing and that it is working with internal teams, external cybersecurity experts and “the appropriate authorities.”
Dive Insight:
When announcing the cybersecurity issue within its network on Monday, Ahold Delhaize said it had taken some systems offline “to help protect them.”
The websites for Food Lion, Giant Food and The Giant Company note that customers can still place delivery orders through Instacart, DoorDash and Uber Eats. Fuel stations for The Giant Company, Giant Food and Stop & Shop are operating normal business hours, according to the website notices.
On Monday, ADUSA told Grocery Dive that it didn’t have a timeline for when its systems would come back online. In a Tuesday press release, Ahold Delhaize said it is in the process of starting “a controlled re-launch of certain systems.”
“We recognize that these actions have caused disruption for customers, associates and partners, but protecting our infrastructure in the best interest of our customers, associates and partners is a top priority. Our teams are working with urgency to investigate the incident and restore affected systems safely,” Ahold Delhaize said Tuesday.
The company said that it would not share further details that could compromise security measures or interfere with response efforts.
“Although our investigation is still ongoing, we have no evidence at this moment that customer and associate data was taken in this cybersecurity incident,” Ahold Delhaize said in its most recent statement.
The multi-day online disruption comes nearly two years after Ahold Delhaize dealt with a cybersecurity incident that forced some systems offline, caused outages on banner websites and temporarily suspended Hannaford’s e-commerce services. That 2024 security breach also potentially exposed sensitive information belonging to more than 2 million people.
