Woolworths shoppers forced to abandon trolleys amid IT glitch

Shoppers have been left in a spin, after an IT glitch forced Woolworths stores across Australia to close their doors.

People have complained of being forced to abandon their trolleys full of the weekly shop and told to come back in 15-minutes, only to return to find their trolleys gone.

The technical issue shut down registers and meant payments could not be processed

The supermarket giant issued a statement confirming “an IT issue impacted registers at around half (of their) supermarkets nationwide”.

Abandoned trolleys @woolworths due to a computer glitch. #Woolworths #3AW693 #abcmelbourne #ChannelTen #Channel7 pic.twitter.com/W2WWETRO3P

— Ozzy Mel (@ozzy_mel) April 16, 2018

Woolworths claims it was only “for a short period of time” and that registers were back online by 5pm.

Some customers took to the company’s Facebook page or Twitter to express their outrage at having to go through the hour-long family shop again after their trolley was taken away.

In the last isle finishing of the shopping at #Woolworths when they tell us their computers have crashed and we can’t finish our shopping. Told “A nation wide error” Empty trolleys and baskets everywhere as people left while they began to lock the store down.@7NewsMelbourne

— John Billing (@JohnBilling3199) April 16, 2018

While others were happy to have been given their groceries for free.

Others saw the humour in the “first world problem”.

I survived the great #Woolworths checkout outage of 2018.
45 minutes with my food on the belt ready to checkout.#NeverForget

— No faith in humanity (@twinfold) April 16, 2018

Apparently @woolworths registers are… #woolworths pic.twitter.com/1bVv2rIo98

— Claudia Hooper (@claudiquante) April 16, 2018