M&S pauses deliveries of some food items to Ocado after cyber-attack

Marks & Spencer has been forced to pause deliveries of some packaged food items to the online grocery site Ocado as the high street stalwart continues to battle the consequences of a cyber-attack that began a week ago.

The latest issue is understood to affect a small number of items listed on Ocado, which is co-owned by M&S, which halted all orders through its M&S.com website and apps on Friday. M&S did not confirm the number of items affected but said it had worked with Ocado and its suppliers “to minimise any disruption to the small proportion of the range delivered through our network to Ocado”.

The disruption caused by the hack – and uncertainty over when it will end – has wiped more than £500m off the stock market value of M&S in the past week as experts said it had clearly suffered a cyber-attack on a huge scale.

The company has apologised to shoppers for the “inconvenience” caused by the attack, which will hit its online clothing and homeware sales amounting to almost £3.8m a day on average.

On Monday, the retailer told 200 agency staff at its main distribution centre for its clothing and homewares at Castle Donington in Leicestershire to stay at home as orders on M&S.com remained on hold for the fourth day in a row, as first reported by Sky News.

Shoppers are still able to browse online and shop in M&S’s physical stores using cash or cards, but some difficulties continue in stores with gift cards not currently being accepted. Returning goods is only possible at tills in clothing and homeware stores or via post. Food stores are not currently able to accept returns.

However, the company said shoppers did not need to take any action – suggesting no customer data had been accessed.

M&S has hired cybersecurity experts to help investigate and manage the problem and said it was taking actions to further protect the network to ensure it could continue serving shoppers.

It has limited access to its systems via its virtual private network for staff working from home to try to stop the spread of the attack, the Sunday Times reported.

Clothing suppliers told the Guardian they had not been asked to pause deliveries as yet but feared this could be the case if online orders were paused for another week or more.

“If it is not resolved by the end of this week it is going to become an issue,” one said.

He said the difficulties came at a time that “sales are going exceptionally well in stores and things are looking fantastic”. May was likely to be a “huge month” for some clothing products given the burst of warm weather, which has kickstarted demand for summer gear and before the wedding and school proms season.

The retail website closure came after several days of problems in stores where contactless payments and the collection of online orders were hit from Monday. Contactless payments were restarted late on Thursday.

A separate technical problem on the Saturday of the busy Easter weekend affected only contactless payments.

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Shoppers said problems with picking up online orders made before the website shut down continued over the weekend.

“I have received several emails asking me to collect, made a special journey to my local store, 18 miles, only to be told I could not collect. Staff were brilliant,” one shopper wrote on Facebook.

Another said: “I returned an online order in store yesterday but it’s not showing on my account.”

M&S told shoppers on social media that orders placed after Wednesday 23 April would be refunded. Those expecting to pick up online orders in stores this week that had been placed before Wednesday were told to wait for a “ready to collect” notification email before heading to a store. It admitted to additional difficulties for those who had ordered party food, including wedding cakes, with some orders cancelled while notification emails were not always working even if orders were arriving in stores.

Security experts warned shoppers to watch out for scammers capitalising on the high-profile incident.

Kate Calvert, an analyst at Investec, said the longer it took for online sales to resume, the worse the hit would be for M&S. “There will be a short-term profit impact without a doubt,” she said.

M&S said in January that it had rung up strong sales over the Christmas period. It is due to publish full-year results on 21 May.