Coles has suffered a major outage of its online shopping website, prompting customers to publicly vent their frustration.
The supermarket giant has named a software issue for the site being offline. It has left customers unable to place online orders for the past two and a half days.
“The Coles Online website is currently offline due to an internal software issue that occurred during regular maintenance,” a Coles spokesperson said in a statement to nine.com.au.
“Our team is working to get the site back online and we apologise to our customers for the inconvenience.”
The spokesperson declined to comment on when the site would be back up and running or whether any customer orders had been lost in the outage.
However, as a gesture of goodwill, Coles has offered customers with Flybuys accounts a $15 voucher to purchase goods in store.
This has caused friction online, with more than 900 messages posted to the Coles Facebook page on the issue, many from customers unsure why they didn’t receive the offer.
“It was very nice to receive an email giving me $15 credit to be spent in store but unfortunately I am virtually housebound and completely rely on online shopping,” one customer wrote.
“Maybe Coles could give online orders a free delivery window instead… when it’s up again of course. Going in store is impossible for me too,” another customer wrote.
As well as dealing with the outage, the supermarket giant has been forced to deal with online trolls who have set up fake accounts pretending to be from Coles official customer service account.
Another customer, who runs her own business, said the outage had meant she would not be able to fulfil a “crucial” delivery.
“Very frustrated as the business is in an isolated suburb some distance from a Coles store. As we have been closed for two weeks this delivery was crucial to our operations for this week in a primary school,” the customer wrote.
In response to why customers wouldn’t temporarily switch to Coles rival Woolworths, one Coles customer said: “Unfortunately, Woolworths doesn’t deliver in my area so have no other option.”
