Most independent forecourt operators appear to have escaped relatively unscathed from Friday’s IT outage which brought down Microsoft computer systems across the world and led to Morrisons and Sainsbury’s unable to take fuel card payments at their supermarket sites.
Mostly the issue was an inconvenience to petrol retailers Forecourt Trader spoke to, simply holding up the ordering of stock, or preventing access to central fuel price data. But things proved trickier for those using Windows software for their payment systems, as well as their back office IT.
The problem, said to have affected millions of devices, arose Friday morning after a faulty software update by cyber security company CrowdStrike, which led to computers operating Windows 10 and Windows 11 unable to turn on properly afterwards.
Oliver Blake at Oasis Services at Long Riston, Hull was one of the retailers who was hit by the so-called blue screen of doom when his staff tried to log on to the site’s back office computer at 6.30am on Friday morning.
He advised the employee to reboot the system, but when the screen was turned back on it still said ‘recovering’. He said: “I came onto site and saw it for myself, tried rebooting again, same issue. I then logged this with my IT provider whose phones went straight to voicemail, which was the giveaway that something bigger was wrong.”
Fortunately for Oliver his tills do not run through Windows 11 and so it was just the back office computer affected.
It meant the Gulf site with a Spar store could trade, but was unable to place orders for delivery for the following day until 11am, after having been given a password at 10.30am to apply a fix using the command prompt screen. Later that evening CrowdStrike issued a further fix, said Oliver, to bring back online any devices still affected.
Guy White, managing director of The Laurels Service Station in Horncastle, Lincolnshire, said the only impact was a hiccup in ordering.
“It was no issue for us to be honest. Shell had it sorted. Their order platform was down, but we were able to telephone orders, so it was very well organised.
“There was a six-hour delay from Blakemore on delivery, but that was totally acceptable to me, because of course it was a very busy day.”
For Richard Roberts, managing director at Trident Honda at Ottershaw, Surrey, the only disruption was not being able to access to Shell’s fuel prices. “But other than that, it was a normal day,” he said.
Others came up with creative work-arounds. Rob Exelby, for example, said that while his five sites in the north of England were “largely fine”, some fuel cards were offline for a few hours and staff had to manually copy out fuel card details on a form and make a phone call for payment authorisation. Fortunately, its head office and site systems were unaffected.
Tom Buckley, general manager at Pricewatch Group which owns 10 forecourts in Sussex, set up a WhatsApp group for all of the site managers to share information on any problems, and they all had ‘cash only’ signs to the ready. But he said they were not needed.
“We were lucky, we didn’t have any sites affected in the end. Half of Eastbourne did go cashless and there was a long queue for the cash machines in Eastbourne town centre outside Waitrose opposite our Esso site,” said Tom.
And Seb Hawtree of Hawtree & Sons Riverside Garage in Gillingham, Dorset, said in fact his family’s forecourt saw an uplift in sales, because unlike other outlets in the area it was able to trade normally. It was not so fortunate with its standalone convenience store, where it had to ask customers to pay in cash. “Customers were able to use the ATM on site thankfully,” he said.
But although Oliver Blake said he got away lightly, he wants to be safeguarded against any repeat problem.
“A lot of retailers I know lost tills and back office from opening till 11/12 midday.
“I have since been in contact with my IT provider and suggested that either all updates going forward are tested before sending down to sites, or we postpone Windows updates so that we don’t have to ever be in this situation again,” he said.
