Stop & Shop, Giant, Food Lion Sites Down in Ahold Delhaize Cyber Incident

The websites and apps for Stop & Shop, Giant Food, Hannaford, Food Lion and The Giant Company went dark on Oct. 12 after their Dutch parent, Ahold Delhaize, said it was dealing with “a security issue within its network” and had taken some systems offline. Stores, pharmacies and fuel stations stayed open, according to maintenance notices reported by The Boston Globe, and unfulfilled online orders are being refunded. The company has given no timeline for bringing the sites back, and as of Monday evening, Oct. 12, it had not said whether customer data was taken.

The trouble started a day earlier. Network problems began on the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 11, according to NL Times, which reported that work had stopped at several Albert Heijn distribution centres in the Netherlands. By Monday morning, all five US banners were offline, Grocery Dive reported, along with Albert Heijn, Etos and Gall & Gall in Europe.

Stop & Shop, Giant and Food Lion: what works and what doesn’t

If you walk into a store, you can buy groceries. The company’s Oct. 12 statement says plainly: “At this time, our stores are open and serving customers.”

Anything that runs through the website or app is a different story. The maintenance pages told shoppers that online and app orders that couldn’t be filled would be refunded, the Globe reported, and Giant Food pointed customers to DoorDash, Uber Eats and Instacart instead. Supermarket News reported that online grocery ordering and deliveries were suspended across the US chains.

Inside the stores, things look shakier. Stop & Shop employees told BleepingComputer they couldn’t get to their schedules or pay stubs. An internal Food Lion memo shared by employees described an IT outage that could leave stores unable to shop, stage or hand off orders.

Europe is a step ahead of the US in visible damage. Only Albert Heijn’s Zaandam distribution centre was still running, according to a supplier email obtained by RTL Z and cited by NL Times, and NL Times reported that fresh fruit and vegetables were likely to be scarcer than frozen goods and bread. Ahold Delhaize shares closed at €31.38 on Euronext Amsterdam on Oct. 12, down 3.15% from the open.

What Ahold Delhaize won’t say yet

The press release is short. It never uses the word “attack” or “ransomware.” A spokesperson pointed BleepingComputer back to it and did not answer whether store systems were hit, whether the disruption was global, or whether devices had been encrypted. Ahold Delhaize USA told Grocery Dive it had no statement beyond the release and no timeline for restoring systems.

No criminal group had publicly claimed the incident as of Oct. 12, Cybersecurity News reported. That gap matters for shoppers: a ransomware gang’s claim is usually the first public sign that data was stolen, and in Ahold Delhaize’s last incident that signal took five months to arrive.

The timing invites a link to France, where hackers overnight on Oct. 11 pushed connected supermarket fridges to 50 degrees Celsius for six hours at Intermarché stores, Reuters reported. French officials traced it to a vulnerability in refrigeration software from Danish supplier Danfoss. Ahold Delhaize said there was no reason to link the French incidents to its own supermarkets, according to AAP. Nothing public connects the two.

The 2024 Ahold Delhaize breach is the reason to pay attention

In November 2024, Ahold Delhaize USA disclosed a cybersecurity issue in its US network that took down Hannaford’s e-commerce, left some New England Stop & Shop shelves thin, and stopped some pharmacies from processing debit and gift cards, Supermarket News reported at the time. The INC Ransom group claimed the attack in April 2025. In June 2025, the company reported to Maine’s attorney general that 2,242,521 people were affected, according to SecurityWeek, with exposed data including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s licence and passport numbers, financial account details and health information.

The release never uses the word “attack.” In 2024, the first proof that data was stolen arrived five months after the outage.

Our read: assume nothing about your data until the company says something specific.

What to do if you shop at Stop & Shop, Giant, Hannaford or Food Lion

• Shop in person, and bring a backup payment method. Stores are open. In 2024, some pharmacies couldn’t take debit or gift cards during the outage, so a second card or cash is cheap insurance.
• Call your pharmacy before a refill run. The notices say pharmacies are operating normally, but with the apps offline, don’t count on placing a refill request through them.
• Watch your card for the refund. If you had a pickup or delivery order in progress, look for the reversal on your statement. If a charge for an order you never received doesn’t come back, raise it with your card issuer.
• Ignore links in “refund” emails and texts. Outages like this are a gift to phishers (more of our security coverage). Type the store’s address yourself once it’s back, and never give a password or card number to someone who contacts you.
• If you got a 2024 breach letter, lock your credit now. A freeze at all three bureaus is free; our step-by-step guide for a leaked Social Security number covers it. Use a unique password for your store account, or a passkey where one is offered (here is how passkeys work).

The last time this happened, Hannaford’s online store stayed down for days and the data-theft claim came in April. This time, the first number Ahold Delhaize has published is the €31.38 share price.