IT maintenance gone wrong crashes supermarket systems across South Island

Fendalton New World Christchurch was closed because of the IT issue and reopened at about 6pm. Photo / Hamish Clark

Supermarket shoppers experienced delays this afternoon after "major IT issues" closed several stores in the South Island.

Pak'nSave in Dunedin, New World Gardens and New World Temuka were among the supermarkets which closed their doors. Fendalton New World Christchurch was also closed due to the outage and reopened about 6pm.

By 6.30pm, normal operations resumed - the issue was fixed and stores had been advised by Foodstuffs that they could return to trading.

Earlier, Foodstuffs said in a statement the issue was a result of routine maintenance gone wrong.

"At around 4pm this afternoon a standard IT maintenance update was pushed through the system and inadvertently caused stability issues within South Island stores point of sale network.

"We would really like to apologise to customers who have been trying to shop during this time, we know the system being offline is an inconvenience, but rest assured we are working hard to get things online again as quickly as possible."

Foodstuffs reiterated the issue was not caused by a cyber-attack.

New World Temuka had said on its Facebook page due to a widespread issue.

"We and other supermarket chains are experiencing major IT issues with our checkout computer systems.

"We have unfortunately had to close our doors as we cannot trade."

New World Gore told shoppers on social media just after 5pm it had also been forced to close, but said its systems were back up and running and it could reopen about 5.45pm.

A shopper at New World Gardens in Dunedin said before it closed there were significant delays for shoppers in getting items through checkouts.

A Queenstown woman said shoppers at Pak'nSave were being told about the IT issues. Staff offered to put items in a chiller for shoppers to collect later.

At New World in Queenstown a security guard told customers the store was closed due to a South Island-wide issue.

Countdown said on its Facebook site earlier this afternoon that it was experiencing technical issues with its website.

"Our customer care team are unable to help with queries on these, but we assure you we are aware of the outage and working to get this fixed asap!"

Additional reporting: NZ Herald