Woolworths' social media team was kept on its toes yesterday as it had to field an inundation of complaints and queries via online platforms, after the retail giant's IT systems failed around midday.
The retailer suffered a blanket technical failure yesterday, which left key services across its South African stores - including card payments, airtime purchases, utility bill payments and redemption of gift cards - inoperative. Woolworths.co.za, the company's e-commerce platform, also went down.
At 9am this morning, a Woolworths SA Facebook update stated the company's technicians had worked "through the night" and that most services were up and running again.
Online updates
From about 2pm yesterday, Woolworths updated customers via its social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter - on which the group has over 227 000 and 48 300 followers, respectively.
At about 2pm yesterday, Woolworths started putting customers in the picture with the following post:
"Unfortunately, we've had an outage affecting many of our key services... We understand that this is a huge inconvenience to you and we're really sorry. Our technical team is working as fast they can to find a solution. At the moment, we can't say when we'll be back up, but we'll keep you posted on our progress. Again, we're terribly sorry. Thanks for your patience."
About three hours later, and still no sign of when the issue would be resolved, Woolworths tweeted: "Hi all, an update on our technical issue: we're still working on fixing it. Making progress, but we aren't quite there yet, we're afraid."
The retailer later advised customers to bring their Woolworths card, or to draw cash should they wish to shop at Woolworths, assuring social media followers a further update would be provided today.
Latest update
Woolworths told ITWeb just after 9am this morning: "The only transactions that cannot currently be processed in stores are gift cards; and online shopping is currently down. About 95% of all store systems are currently running normally."
Woolworths says the outage occurred during routine maintenance in its data centre yesterday. The malfunction affected all stores.
"Our technicians are currently working on getting online back on track and on ensuring we can process gift cards. We expect these systems to be restored shortly."
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