Hackers turn supermarket fridges to 50C across seven European countries, forcing stores to throw away tonnes of spoiled food
Fridges and freezers at dozens of stores from Sweden to Belgium were remotely switched to defrost mode overnight, ruining perishable stock, as cybersecurity agencies investigate and the UK warns retailers to update fridge controllers urgently.
Supermarkets across at least seven European countries were hit by a suspected cyberattack overnight between Sunday and Monday that remotely raised the temperature of fridges and freezers, in some cases to 50 degrees Celsius or more, forcing stores to empty shelves and throw away large quantities of spoiled food.
Reports from Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Estonia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Finland described the same pattern: refrigeration units that should have been holding food at well below freezing were switched into defrost mode or had their settings changed remotely, so that meat, dairy, frozen meals and other perishable goods warmed up through the night before staff arrived in the morning.
In Belgium, the Delhaize chain said refrigeration systems in dozens of its stores were affected by an IT incident, while the Colruyt group said five shops operating under its Spar franchise had their fridge systems attacked. Carrefour in Belgium described the incident as a cyberattack, saying there was no other explanation, and reported problems at 15 of its stores.
An AFP correspondent who visited a Delhaize store at Boortmeerbeek, north-east of Brussels, found refrigerators and freezers standing empty, with a sign blaming hackers. Local media reports cited by other outlets put the value of food discarded at one Delhaize branch alone at about 100,000 euros, a reminder of how quickly a single night of warm storage can turn a whole department's stock into waste.
In Sweden, the ICA and Coop grocery chains both reported temperature spikes. At an ICA franchise store in Stockholm, sales manager Engla Ingwall told Reuters that the attack struck at 2 a.m. but was only noticed hours later, and that all the store's freezers had reached 50 degrees Celsius. In the southern town of Sjobo, an ICA store said on social media that its fridges and freezers had been hacked overnight and set to 50 degrees, before closing temporarily and later reopening. Coop told Swedish media that six or seven of its stores were affected.
The damage was not limited to the big chains. Luc De Laet, founder and owner of a Belgian butchery chain, said he was woken at 3:30 a.m. by an employee reporting a problem, rushed to his store south of Antwerp and found the fridges as warm as 18 degrees Celsius, ruining about 15,000 euros worth of meat. In Ireland, the Musgrave group said 13 SuperValu stores were hit by a suspected cyberattack, and in Estonia a hacker accessed a computer controlling refrigeration at one Selver supermarket and changed a freezer setting to 50 degrees.
Stephan Moelans, chief executive of Belgian refrigeration firm Sabcobel, which operates Delhaize's systems, told the Belga news agency that the incident was a cyberattack in which the units' evaporators were switched to defrost mode. He said about 20 of the units his firm manages were affected and that technicians had been mobilised from 1 a.m. to disconnect the affected units from the network.
National authorities moved quickly to assess the scale of the disruption. Sweden's national cybersecurity centre said it was working on several incidents affecting grocery stores across the country, although its head, John Billow, said it could not speculate on who was behind the attacks. In Britain, the National Cyber Security Centre warned retailers to update the software on fridge temperature controllers with urgency, even though no British stores were reported among the worst affected. The European Union said on Monday that it was taking the cyberattacks very seriously.
The episode echoes a similar attack in France last month, when police said hackers seized control of cooling units at hundreds of supermarkets belonging to the Intermarche and Cooperative U chains, raising temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius and causing fires and food losses. That precedent, three weeks earlier, is one reason investigators are examining whether the same methods, the same weaknesses in connected refrigeration controllers, or the same actors are involved this time, although no authority has yet attributed the latest attacks to anyone.
Not every affected company used the same language. Some chains confirmed a cyberattack outright, others spoke only of an IT incident or an incident overnight, and the Swedish chains initially said they had no information that their refrigeration systems had been the victims of a cyberattack. No group has claimed responsibility, and investigators have not said how the attackers gained access, whether payment or ransom demands were made, or whether customer or company data was touched.
What happens next will be watched well beyond the grocery trade. Retailers must now check whether any food that warmed up could have reached customers before the problem was spotted, restock the emptied departments, and decide how far to isolate refrigeration controls from wider networks. Cybersecurity agencies are expected to publish guidance on securing the small connected controllers that run cold storage, and the incident is likely to sharpen a wider European debate about how much critical everyday infrastructure — from supermarket chillers to hospital systems — depends on devices that were never designed to face hostile hackers.
For shoppers, the immediate effect is likely to be visible in empty freezer aisles and reduced fresh ranges in the affected stores for a few days, rather than any wider shortage. But the attack has shown how a single overnight intrusion into an unglamorous corner of the food system can waste tonnes of food, cost individual shops tens of thousands of euros, and unsettle customers across a continent — all without a single shop window being broken.
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