There may be a few holes in the menu at a restaurant near you. The food wholesaler Metro Group initially recognized a “computer failure” which occurred from Monday to Wednesday morning, greatly slowing down the activities of its stores, before affirming this Thursday in a press release that it was in fact a a cyberattack. As a result, catering professionals have experienced some disappointments and difficulties in obtaining supplies.
“There was no possibility of editing invoices because the computer system did not respond on Monday”, explains Tonio, a cafe owner in Rouen who had come to a center and found the barriers open “because of a problem of reading store access cards. He could not benefit from promotion or bring back his glass bottles in deposit this Thursday, again because of a computer problem. “A department manager clearly told us about a cyberattack that affected the group,” he says.
Initially, the supplier indicated having “suffered a computer failure which affected the whole group and the computer systems are being restored, the problem is solved”. But the consequences on activity pointed to the classic pattern of a cyberattack, as the Sud Ouest newspaper already argued on Tuesday. Employees had, for example, recovered the use of their mailboxes on Wednesday after several complicated days. The time often required to thoroughly clean computer systems in search of the cause of the problem.