Certain stores across Canada owned by Empire Company Ltd., including Sobeys, Safeway and affiliated pharmacy services, continue to experience disruptions due to an issue with information technology systems.
Empire, which owns Sobeys, Lawtons, IGA, Safeway, Farm Boy, Foodland and FreshCo, among other brands, announced Monday that a computer problem is preventing some of its pharmacies from filling prescriptions.
The problem has also caused some services to lag or work only intermittently.
A press release from the company said it is working to fix the problem, but could not estimate when all services will be restored.
“At Sobeys, exceeding the needs of our customers is always our top priority,” said Chief Operating Officer Pierre St-Laurent in the press release. “Our only focus right now is to fix this issue and we will provide further updates as relevant information becomes available.”
A sign at a Sobeys store in Halifax reflects one of the system outages the chain was experiencing Monday morning. (Craig Paisley/CBC)
The CBC reached out to the company with questions about the computer problem, but an emailed response simply pointed to the press release.
Over the weekend, some pharmacy staff told the CBC they were unable to access their computers, but could supply customers with medication for several days if customers presented their empty bottles.
Maple Leaf Announces ‘Cybersecurity Incident’
Meanwhile, Maple Leaf Foods announced in a press release Sunday night that a “cybersecurity incident” caused a system outage at the company.
The company said it became aware of the issue over the weekend and immediately began working with cybersecurity and recovery experts, information systems professionals and third-party specialists to investigate the outage.
Maple Leaf said it expects ongoing operational and service disruptions while it works to resolve the outage and said it does not have an estimated time for restoration.
The company declined an interview. In an emailed statement, Maple Leaf said the outages “vary by business unit, plant and location.”
“something’s not right”
Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie University’s Agri-Food Analytics Laboratory, said he started getting messages from people Friday night about problems at Empire, including copies of internal company letters.
He said the lack of public information coming from Empire makes him suspect the problem is more significant than a simple information technology problem. He said companies would probably be more open about it.
“But they’re not right now, which begs the question, what’s really going on here? . . . I mean, Maple Leaf was clear about that, it’s a cybersecurity issue, so it can mean a lot of different things, but they had clear. . Whereas Sobeys, it’s not clear. Lots of question marks, but you can feel something’s not right.”
Charlebois said the situation reminds him of last year’s ransomware attack against the world’s largest meat processing company, JBS. The Brazil-based company paid $11 million to hackers who broke into the computer system.
Ransomware attacks use malware installed on a computer to allow people to lock and hold data or information for ransom.
Customers line up to pay for items at a Sobeys in Halifax. (Craig Paisley/CBC)
“JBS is a multi-billion dollar company, OK? It’s one of the biggest food companies in the world. If I had to pay a bailout, I can’t imagine the pressure some Canadian companies are under. They’re much smaller and less resourceful,” he said. said Charlebois.
He said he doesn’t see much evidence that cyber security has been taken seriously by the food industry and is concerned that more attacks will occur in the sector in the future.
“The whole food system works on the basis that computers will communicate with each other,” he said. “So as soon as you have a cyber attack that disrupts the efficiency of supply chains, costs could go up. Even worse, access to food could also become a problem. In fact, you could see many stores without supply for days and you don’t want that to happen.”
The CBC asked Sobeys if its computer problem was a ransomware or a cybersecurity problem. The company did not respond.