cyber attack claims a ‘real worry’ for companies

There is no evidence to suggest that the tech outages at four of the UK’s best known retailers were linked.

McDonald’s said a “configuration change” was to blame for the global outage that forced outlets to close on Friday. Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s blamed the glitch that hit online deliveries over the weekend on a “software update” while Tesco experienced an unrelated issue that also affected deliveries.

Greggs has been tight-lipped about the fault that put tills across the country out of use on Wednesday morning, but has since said that the issue has been resolved.

None of these companies said they suffered a cyber attack that led to these technical failures, but McDonald’s was quick to stress that malicious actors had nothing to do with it.

Their haste reflects the fact that being associated with a cyber attack is a real worry for companies as consumers become increasingly literate about access to their data and concerned that it could fall into the wrong hands.

But the reality is that cybersecurity issues are one of the biggest threats on the horizon for businesses. The majority of larger UK businesses have fallen victim to a cyber security incident in the last 12 months, according to new figures published by the government on Wednesday.

The other side of this unfortunate series of events is that a spate of unrelated major technical glitches among some of the UK’s biggest retailers prompts the question: is it purely coincidence or are these sorts of outages becoming more common?