Ahold Delhaize U.S. grocery websites remain down all week following cybersecurity incident

Check your grocery app before you drive out this week. Ahold Delhaize, the massive Dutch retail group operating five major U.S. supermarket chains including Giant Food, Hannaford and Food Lion, has suffered a severe multi-day cybersecurity incident that took all of its primary websites and online apps completely offline according to Yahoo Finance. The outage has completely severed the digital links that shoppers rely on every single week, forcing customers to use third-party delivery services like DoorDash, Instacart and Uber Eats just to place a pickup or delivery order. For a company that watched its U.S. digital sales jump by more than 14 percent in its most recent quarter while comparable-store sales crawled at under 1 percent, e-commerce is the main engine of growth. But right now, loyal shoppers cannot log into their accounts to use the accumulated rewards sitting at the heart of the value proposition at these stores. When customers cannot redeem their savings, they start looking at the parking lot across the street. The longer these digital systems stay frozen, the easier it is for rival grocers to capture customers who decide they might not come back at all. For store owners watching their own IT security, it is a sharp reminder that a single week of downtime can undo years of customer loyalty building. As the old retail saying goes, trust takes years to build and only minutes to break.