Sainsbury’s Digital Meltdown Leaves Shoppers Stranded
In a world where you expect groceries just a tap away, a sudden tech failure can send ripples through thousands of homes. That’s exactly what unfolded in 2024 when Sainsbury’s—one of the UK’s retail giants—saw its app and website grind to a halt. Swathes of customers woke up to cancelled orders and radio silence from customer service as a software update mishap knocked out most online deliveries overnight. By midday, what started as a glitch became a full-blown disruption, upending everything from home shopping to quick runs for milk.
The chaos didn’t stop at missed deliveries. Even those popping into stores felt the tremors, especially at the till. Sainsbury’s in-store contactless systems refused to play ball, forcing a hasty switch to chip-and-pin or—if you’re lucky enough—a spare tenner in your wallet. For customers who’ve gone plastic-only, it was like stepping back a decade.
Sainsbury’s tech support lines lit up. Help, though, was limited; the main advice was to clear browser cookies, empty your cache, or try swapping devices. For most shoppers, these well-worn tricks did little when the backbone of the system itself was down. It wasn’t just a one-off, either. The outage echoed previous incidents: back in 2008, a power failure took down the Sainsbury’s tech nerve centre, and in 2021 a similar glitch left shoppers unable to even change an existing order for hours. Despite claims of beefing up their IT defences, cracks in the system keep showing.
Tesco Dodges the Worst, While Ocado Keeps Quiet
Sainsbury’s wasn’t alone in its troubles. Around the same time, Tesco, another titan in the online grocery world, admitted it had 'minor delivery disruptions,' though they managed to keep most customers in motion. For regular Tesco drivers and warehouse staff, it meant juggling last-minute reroutes and keeping apologetic smiles ready for delays. Meanwhile, Ocado kept details of any disruption close to its chest, with no clear sign if it faced similar breakdowns or just watched events unfold from the sidelines.
This perfect storm of outages highlights the fragility built into the UK’s rapidly expanding digital grocery market. With more and more shoppers ditching the trolley for their smartphone, super-smooth tech has become as important as fresh bread and milk. But as Sainsbury’s June 2025 service checks still showed patchy performance and slow loads, it’s clear that Britain’s supermarkets are still playing catch-up with their own digital ambitions. Reliability, it seems, is a work in progress.