Unwanted digital disruption: Shoppers delayed by store-wide digital outages

Tesco said it will cut 1,750 management roles and another 350 in other restructuring – Copyright AFP SUJIT JAISWAL

In the U.K. a number of major retailers have experienced outages in their digital services, causing frustration for consumers. Those impacted include McDonald’s, Sainsbury’s and Tesco. These events disrupted shopping experiences, online orders and even caused some shops and restaurants to shut.

Furthermore, the BBC reports that customers of the UK’s biggest building society – Nationwide – reported a range of problems, including transferring money, towards the end of March 2024.

In light of this incident, Digital Journal heard from Jake Madders, co-founder and director of Hyve Managed Hosting.

Jake Madders facilitated the growth of Hyve from a small start-up in 2001 to a successful managed cloud hosting company with a global customer base.

Madders pinpoints the cause of the digital downtime as inefficient IT practices: “Interestingly, this appears to be a software update that was pushed out overnight, causing the outages. It’s strange that both Tesco and Sainsbury’s went out at the same time, as the two companies are claiming the issues were not connected.”

In the U.K., these two firms are the two biggest supermarket groups –  and fierce rivals in the competitive world of groceries. For both firms to experience a problem with their online shopping channels at the same time was very unusual and this compounded the number of shoppers affected.

The supermarkets’ tech issues come just one day after McDonald’s experienced an IT outage that left customers unable to order food. McDonald’s blamed the issue on a third-party configuration change.

Taking the need to plan and execute IT projects carefully a little further, Madders points out: “When you push an update out to a global system, chances are you need to distribute the code to every component simultaneously or within a short window of each other, as they likely interconnect and, therefore, require the same code versions running. This would explain the delay in recovery, as there would be lots of infrastructure affected.”

Seemingly, these digital services outages demonstrate how the increased complexity and scale of business IT systems, as part of digital transformation initiatives, are likely to cause more frequent service interruptions going forwards.

In terms of lessons to be learned, Madders opines: “This highlights the need for rigorous testing and a robust deployment process prior to updating code releases, as well as rollback and recovery/DR plans that would allow failed updates to be reverted quickly and simply. Many Managed Services providers should be able to assist with this.”