Over 300 Spar stores close temporarily due to a cyber attack

SPAR have been forced to close more than 300 stores for a second day after being wiped out by a cyber attack.

The stores shut their doors yesterday after they were unable to take card payments.

Alamy

More than 300 Spar shops are shut following a cyber attack[/caption]

But the online attack still hasn’t been resolved – with 330 Spar stores across the north of England still closed.

The website for Preston food distributor James Hall and Co is still crashed.

A Spar spokesperson said: “At James Hall we are currently aware of an online attack on our IT systems.

“This has affected around 330 Spar stores across the north of England over the past 24 hours and we are working to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.

“It is currently impacting stores’ ability to process card payments meaning that a number of Spar stores are currently closed to shoppers or only taking cash payments.

“We apologise for the inconvenience this is causing our customers and we are working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation.”

It is not clear how long the outage will last – with one store admitting it could be “10 minutes, 10 hours or 10 days”.

They added: “Due to a major and widespread IT failure across the entire Northern Spar network, all Northern Spar stores will be closed for an unknown period of time.

“We will update when we know more, but in the meantime please understand that our staff cannot open until the systems are restored.”

As well as credit card machines, the problem is also affecting tills and office systems.

Before you make a trip to your local Spar, you might want to check ahead to see if it’s still open.

Check with the shop’s locator tool to find out when your closest one is.

Spar is not the only retailer to have been hit by hacks recently.

Tesco’s website and app went down in October following what was thought to be an alleged hack on the supermarket’s sites.

Hundreds of shoppers couldn’t order their groceries online, or make changes to pre-arranged deliveries.

While in July, a mass outage meant banks, streaming sites and retailer’s websites went down in what was thought to be a cyber attack – but reportedly wasn’t.