A “technical issue” left swathes of Tesco customers without their online grocery orders on Sunday.
Customers expecting shopping to arrive yesterday found their orders had been cancelled at short notice, with the supermarket warning them it was “unable to reschedule these orders”.
The incident saw customer service teams inundated with complaints, with Tesco issuing communications that the “high contact volumes” were leading to a “delay in our response time”.
Affected customers were not charged for their cancelled orders – although some online reported they were warned they would have to wait up to five days for a refund – but were told they would have to find a new delivery slot and place a new order.
Reports of issues peaked at 9am and again at midday, according to the Downdetector website, with thousands logging problems with the service.
Shoppers on social media report being told their order had been cancelled as little as 20 minutes before it was due to arrive. On X (formerly Twitter) customers were told of “major system issues across our stores”. Users also reported the Tesco app was not functioning in the wake of the incident.
“No reason given, just cancelled. Not good enough. I’m expecting a compensation voucher as I now need to go and spend my Sunday food shopping,” one user tweeted.
“Doubly crap with two babies in the house. What a rubbish start to a Sunday morning,” another posted.
Another shopper tweeted: “You’ve taken the money but not delivered. The only contact I have had is an email to say it’s on the way. Your phoneline says deliveries have been cancelled for no good reason. Come on!”
It is understood orders were operational again by mid-afternoon.
“We’ve fixed a technical issue that meant we had to cancel some online orders yesterday,” a Tesco spokesman said. “Our technical team worked around the clock to fix it and customers who were impacted have been contacted directly. We apologise again for the inconvenience.”
In March last year, a technical issue saw Tesco shoppers unable to log in to the supermarket’s website and app on two occasions – meaning many were unable to place orders or take advantage of Tesco Clubcard discounts at the checkout. A similar outage happened in October.
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