Software company providing services to US and UK grocery stores says it was hit by ransomware attack
By Sean Lyngaas, CNN
(CNN) — A major software supply-chain company, which counts US and UK grocery stores and Fortune 500 firms as clients, said it was hit by a ransomware attack this weekend.
The hackers hit Blue Yonder — an Arizona-based software firm acquired by Panasonic in 2021 — affecting a private cloud computing service the company provides some customers, but not the company’s public cloud environment.
A Blue Yonder spokesperson did not answer questions about which clients were affected, including those in the United States. But messages Blue Yonder sent to customers CNN reviewed show the company is scrambling to work with US-based clients to mitigate any impacts on customers.
“On November 21, 2024, Blue Yonder experienced disruptions to its managed services hosted environment, which was determined to be the result of a ransomware incident,” Blue Yonder said in an initial public statement on Friday. The company said in an updated statement on Saturday it was making “steady progress” in its recovery but still did not have a “timeline for restoration.”
Immediate impact was felt in the United Kingdom, where two of the four biggest grocery chains told CNN they were taking steps to deal with the outage.
“We have reverted to a backup process but the outage has caused the smooth flow of goods to our stores to be impacted,” said a spokesperson for Morrisons, which has nearly 500 grocery stores across the United Kingdom.
A spokesperson for Sainsbury, another big UK grocery chain, told CNN it had “contingency processes in place” to deal with the Blue Yonder outage.
Some of the biggest US grocery chains use Blue Yonder, including Albertsons — the parent company of chains like Safeway and Jewel-Osco — and Kroger, the parent company of chains like Ralphs and Fred Meyer. Albertsons and Kroger did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment
Other major corporations that have used Blue Yonder products or services include Proctor & Gamble and Anheuser-Busch, according to Blue Yonder press statements. Neither company responded to requests for comment.
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