Online service still offline

Albert Heijn said on Friday, 16 October, that it cannot deliver online orders through Tuesday, 20 October, and that new orders cannot yet be placed. Customers who had already paid will be compensated once the systems work again. The chain hopes to resume online orders in the second half of next week. The app is not fully working, customer service cannot yet be reached, and personal discounts and savings campaigns are still unavailable.

How the outage unfolded

Ahold Delhaize, the parent company of Albert Heijn, was hit on Sunday, 11 October, by what it calls a cybersecurity incident. Albert Heijn itself took its app, website and online delivery offline, and work stopped at several distribution centres, leaving gaps on shelves in its stores in the Netherlands and Belgium. The chain has not explained how the incident happened. NOS, citing its own sources, reported that it was a hacking attack, but who is behind it remains unclear.

Stores recovered, cause still unclear

In shops, the situation has largely recovered. Supply to stores was fully restored from Thursday, 15 October, and the company says its shops are restocked several times a day. The company is still searching for the exact cause of the incident behind the scenes, and says it is focused on restoring its systems safely. It has not commented on further details of the investigation.

Police report and the minister's call

Albert Heijn had not filed a police report by Thursday evening. Because the company says no sensitive customer data was stolen, police and the Public Prosecution Service see no reason to open an investigation on their own initiative. On Friday, Justice Minister David van Weel said he hoped the company would still file a report.

“I think we are now moving into calmer waters and the time has come to take this step too.”

Expert view on resilience

Pieter Zwaan, a researcher linked to the Clingendael institute and Radboud University, who studied the resilience of the Dutch food supply this year on commission from the government, said the length of the disruption surprised him.

“In our research we assumed that a cyber outage like this would be resolved within a day or two.”

Zwaan stressed that distribution never fully stopped this week, and that gaps on shelves were limited to certain products, mainly fresh produce. He described Dutch supermarket distribution as largely automated, with stores and distribution centres keeping very small stocks, which makes a manual fallback hard to imagine. He also said food security was not at stake, since only one market leader was hit and customers could turn to other chains.

What readers think

In a Telegraaf reader survey, more than eight in ten respondents found their dependence on technology in the food supply worrying, and nearly nine in ten saw the Albert Heijn problems as confirmation that the system is vulnerable. Many readers criticised the company's communication, with one saying the lack of an open explanation of the actual issue gave the feeling that more was going on. Three in four said they had not changed their shopping habits, while others switched to Aldi or to Picnic delivery. Nearly two in three respondents think the government should play a role in cyber incidents in the food chain, while just over a quarter oppose that.