Smeg is asking its UK customers to be “patient” while it investigates a cyber-security attack, which it said was “targeted”.
Posting on Twitter, the appliance brand said: “Unfortunately we have been the victim of a targeted cyber-attack and as such have taken immediate steps to totally shut our systems down to protect our customers and ourselves.”
It said that it had no reason to believe that customer information had been exposed.
“We have a specialist team working around the clock to resolve this issue and get us operational ASAP. We will update out social media feeds as soon as this is the case.
“We thank you for your patience at this time.”
Smeg’s UK server has been down since at least Tuesday afternoon, when it first alerted customers to IT trouble.
The Italian appliance manufacturer tweeted on Tuesday: “Sorry if you’ve been trying to get through to us today, unfortunately our Smeg UK server is unavailable due to a network error. We hope to back up and running shortly!”
Stellisons managing director Steve Scogings, who buys between £20,000 and £30,000 of Smeg stock a month, said he received a Whatsapp message from his Smeg rep on Tuesday morning saying that there were issues with the computer system, and then another message on Wednesday saying the firm’s systems had been hacked.
“It looked like it had been scripted from head office and the rep said to call her for any orders and she would manually put them through,” Scogings said.
“These things happen in the world today. Criminals are always trying to target big multinationals, but so far, it seems they haven’t lost any data and that’s the best that you can hope for. They have dealt with it as best they can. The sales team at Smeg are usually very good.”
Stellisons is a kitchen showroom and consumer electronics retailer with nine sites across Essex, Suffolk and Kent.
- Kbbreview will be updating this story as we get more information.