Coles, Woolworths and 7-Eleven hit by Microsoft Crowdstrike outage causing ‘blue light of death’

The global outage at Microsoft has left supermarkets across Australia in ‘total chaos’.

Customers are reporting ‘huge queues’ at some Coles, Woolworths and 7-Eleven stores after a massive outage hit computers protected by technology from anti-virus giant Crowdstrike.

At Woolworths, the technology crisis caused many, but not all, cash registers to fail and no longer process transactions.

Six Woolies stores have been temporarily closed and the supermarket chain said some locations had “fewer checkouts available than normal”.

One man posted on X, ‘90% of my local Wolworths registers had the (blue screen of death). Lines a mile long, absolute chaos. National outage? Local?’

Meanwhile, Coles Broadway, one of Sydney’s largest supermarkets, has sent staff into the store to tell customers: “Cash only. EFTPOS is down.”

At another Coles branch, the shutters were seen coming down as the manager decided to close the store for the day.

A Windows recovery screen or ‘BSOD’ at a Woolworths checkout on Friday afternoon as chaos ensued during a cyber outage caused by security firm Cloudstrike

Queues formed outside Woolies supermarket as customers were unable to pay for their goods, causing ‘absolute chaos’

Another Coles branch was seen with its shutters pulled down as the manager decided to close for the day

Cloudstrike, which is designed to protect against malware, released a “bad update” on Friday that technology experts said “nuked” every computer it came into contact with.

Computers crashed and could not be restarted.

A frustrated female shopper posted that she had a ‘trolley full of groceries’ and Woolworths announced over the loudspeaker that they are currently unable to accept debit cards due to a ‘Microsoft outage’ and can only accept cash. Huh?!!

‘I hope everything will be working again by the time I’m done, otherwise I’ll have to ditch my cart and run to the nearest ATM.’

A male customer wrote: ‘All the POS machines at my local one by one have been crashing. I’m wondering if this is a widespread problem?’

On X, @Till_Payments posted the message ‘#ServiceUpdate: Large-scale IT outage impacting Australian businesses across the country.’ It also added a click for ‘live updates as our team works to resolve the issue.’

At a Woolworths supermarket in Redfern, Sydney’s south, only one of eight self-service machines was functioning

Woolworths New Zealand posted a message on its website saying it was unaware of the cyberattack. It said: ‘Please wait, our website is working – you are just in a virtual queue.’

‘There are a lot of people shopping right now, so you are in a virtual queue to enter the website.

‘To keep your place in the queue, keep this window open and do not refresh the page.’

At a supermarket in Redfern, in Sydney’s south, only one of eight self-service machines was working.

Woolworths issued a short statement on Friday evening, saying: ‘Some of our stores and other facilities have been impacted as a result of the global IT issue.

‘All stores in the country, except six, are open and operating. In some cases, customers may find fewer checkouts than usual, so we are grateful for their patience.

‘A small number of online orders could not be fulfilled. Those customers have been contacted.

“We thank customers for their patience and understanding. We also want to thank the thousands of team members who helped customers throughout the afternoon and evening.”