CNN
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A major software supply company, which counts US and British supermarkets and Fortune 500 companies among its customers, said it was hit by a ransomware attack over the weekend.
The hackers hit Blue Yonder — an Arizona-based software company acquired by Panasonic in 2021 — and affected a private cloud computing service the company provides to some customers, but not the company’s public cloud environment.
A spokesperson for Blue Yonder did not answer questions about which clients were affected, including in the United States. But messages Blue Yonder sent to customers that CNN reviewed show the company is committed to working with U.S. customers to mitigate any impact on customers.
“On November 21, 2024, Blue Yonder experienced disruptions in the hosted environment of its managed services, which were 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 that it was making “steady progress” in its recovery but still had no “timeline for recovery”.
The immediate impact was felt in Britain, where two of the four largest supermarket chains told CNN they were taking steps to resolve the outage.
“We have returned to a backup process, but the outage has disrupted the smooth flow of goods into our stores,” said a spokesperson for Morrisons, which has almost 500 supermarkets in the UK.
A spokesperson for Sainsbury, another major British supermarket chain, told CNN that “emergency processes” have been put in place to deal with the Blue Yonder outage.
Some of the largest U.S. 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 companies 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.
