Marks & Spencer has told hundreds of workers at its main online distribution centre in Leicestershire to stay at home as website orders remain on hold for the fourth day in a row.
The retailer, which is battling the consequences of a cyber-attack that began a week ago and has affected stores as well as its online business, told 200 agency staff at the Castle Donington site they were not currently required.
The move, first reported by Sky News, came after it halted all orders through its website and apps on Friday. The company has apologised to shoppers for “this inconvenience”, which will hit its online clothing and homeware sales, which amount to almost £3.8m a day on average.
Shoppers are still able to browse online and shop in M&S’s physical stores using cash or card.
The company said shoppers did not need to take any action – suggesting no customer data had been accessed.
M&S has hired cybersecurity experts to help investigate and manage the problem and said it was taking actions to further protect the network to ensure it could continue serving shoppers.
It has also limited access to its systems via its virtual private network for staff working from home to try to stop the spread of the attack, the Sunday Times reported.
The retail website closure came after several days of problems in stores where contactless payments and the collection of online orders were hit from Monday. Contactless payments were restarted late on Thursday.
A separate technical problem on the Saturday of the busy Easter weekend affected only contactless payments.
Shoppers said problems with picking up online orders made before the website shut down continued over the weekend.
“I have received several emails asking me to collect, made a special journey to my local store, 18 miles, only to be told I could not collect. Staff were brilliant,” one shopper wrote on Facebook.
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Another said: “I returned an online order in store yesterday but it’s not showing on my account.”
M&S told shoppers on social media that orders placed after Wednesday 23 April would be refunded. Those expecting to pick up online orders in stores this week that had been placed before Wednesday were told to wait for a “ready to collect” notification email before heading to a store.
Security experts warned shoppers to watch out for scammers capitalising on the high-profile incident.
The Investec analyst Kate Calvert said that the longer it took for online sales to resume, the worse the hit would be for M&S. “There will be a short-term profit impact without a doubt,” she said.
M&S said in January that it had rung up strong sales over the Christmas period. It is due to publish full-year results on 21 May.
