Five Grocery Chains Ran Eight Days With No Website or App. Everything That Still Worked Was Already Physical.
· CX Pulse
Ahold Delhaize's five U.S. grocery chains ran eight days with no website or app. The loyalty program survived through kiosks, cashiers and email.
Five Grocery Chains Ran Eight Days With No Website or App. Everything That Still Worked Was Already Physical.
On Monday, October 12, Ahold Delhaize said it was "experiencing a security issue within its network" and had taken some systems offline "to help protect them." Those systems included the websites and apps of its five U.S. grocery chains: Giant Food, Stop & Shop, Hannaford, Food Lion and The Giant Company. They came back on the morning of Tuesday, October 20.
The company's October 19 update says the investigation "confirmed the suspicious activity resulted from the malicious actions of others," that every store stayed open throughout, and that there is "no evidence at this moment that suggests that any sensitive customer, associate or partner data was taken." The customer side is the more useful story, because it's a live test of a question every business with an app should be able to answer. When the digital layer disappears, what can a customer still do?
What kept working
Grocery Dive tracked the chains through the week, mostly from emails and social posts, since none of them had a site to post on. Points kept accruing because a loyalty member could type a phone number or scan a card at the register. Digital coupons could still be activated and printed at in-store kiosks, the Savings Stations at Giant Food and Stop & Shop, and The Giant Company began automatically activating every coupon in its weekly circular on customers' cards.
Points that would have expired got extended. Giant Food president Ira Kress wrote to customers on Saturday, day six: "Once our website and app are back online, we will extend points that would have expired during this time to ensure you have sufficient time to redeem them." Stop & Shop moved GO Points expiring October 31 to November 30.
The make-good ran through the same physical channels. Stop & Shop offered 10% off the next in-store purchase, redeemed at a kiosk. Giant Food offered $10 off a $50 basket, also at the kiosk. The Giant Company emailed 10% off in place of its usual weekly promotion and sent stores scan cards so a cashier could apply it when a customer mentioned the email. Delivery kept running through Instacart, DoorDash and Uber Eats, and by the end of the first week every banner had relinked its weekly ad.
What didn't
Everything that lived only behind the login. The chains' own online ordering. Account access, order history, saved lists and online redemption of points. For eight days, a customer's relationship with these stores was whatever could be done at a register, at a kiosk, or through another company's app.
Every item on the list of what survived had a physical form before October 12: a kiosk that prints, a phone number typed at checkout, a scan card in a cashier's drawer, a paper circular, an email list. The banners didn't invent a fallback in eight days. They used the ones that were already standing in the store.
The 20-second audit
Open your own app or website as a customer. Go screen by screen, and for each thing a customer can do there, answer one question: if this were a 403 for eight days, how would they do it instead? Earn points. Redeem a coupon. See this week's prices. Place an order. Change a booking. Reach a person.
Where the answer is "at the register," "at the kiosk" or "by phone," you have what Ahold Delhaize had. Where the answer is "they couldn't," that's the finding, and it's worth more than your uptime number, because uptime only tells you how often you've been tested.
For a CX organization at scale
Points expiry is a policy decision, and Giant Food made it by email on day six. Make it now, in writing: an outage extends every expiring balance by its length plus 30 days, and the message goes out on day one rather than day six.
The kiosk is a channel. Giant Food and Stop & Shop had somewhere to put the apology because the Savings Station existed. If your stores or branches have no in-store surface that works without the customer's phone, the outage plan has nowhere to put the make-good.
The channels that carried the message were the ones the company didn't host: email, Instagram, a LinkedIn note from the Stop & Shop president. A status page on your own domain goes dark with your domain, so keep the email list and the social logins where the incident team can reach them when the main systems are off.
Third-party delivery kept the online channel alive at marketplace margins. Put that cost in the incident report next to the restore time. It's the one the customer never saw.
For a smaller business
Your booking tool, your online ordering, the loyalty punch card inside your point-of-sale: each one is a login on somebody else's server, and the plan for when it's gone is usually "we'll figure it out." The grocers' version of figuring it out was a phone number at the register, a printed offer, and an email a cashier could honor by hand. Write your three equivalents on an index card and tape it where the register is. Then send yourself the message you'd want customers to get on day one, and see whether you'd know what to do with it.
A kiosk could print the coupon, so the coupon survived. A cashier could type a phone number, so the points survived. For eight days, the loyalty program at five grocery chains was whatever still worked without the app, and the only reason that was anything at all is that it was built before anyone needed it.
Sources: Ahold Delhaize, "Ahold Delhaize takes precautionary measures following cybersecurity incident," October 12, 2026 · Ahold Delhaize, "Ahold Delhaize update on status of cybersecurity incident," October 19, 2026 · Grocery Dive, "How Ahold Delhaize USA's banners are reaching shoppers amid outages," October 19, 2026 · Grocery Dive, "Ahold Delhaize says there's no evidence cybersecurity incident compromised personal data," updated October 20, 2026