Irish Tesco customers ‘not affected’ by UK systems fault

Tesco Ireland has moved to assure customers here that the computer glitch affecting home deliveries in the United Kingdom was not impacting the company's Irish operations.

The retailer was forced to cancel thousands of online grocery orders in the UK on Tuesday due to a systems fault.

A problem with software used by Tesco workers to pick customer orders from its stores led to the cancellations, which the company said affected less than 10 per cent of orders.

“We’re working hard to fix this problem and apologise to customers for any inconvenience this may cause,” Tesco said by email, without indicating when the problem would be fixed.

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Tesco Ireland said the issues were isolated to the UK business and that home deliveries in Ireland were proceeding as normal.

Eliminate cashiers

“Tesco Ireland has confirmed that stores in Ireland are not affected by this issue and are fulfilling all grocery home deliveries as normal,” it said in a statement.

The breakdown comes as Amazon. com's $13.7 billion (€12.3 billion) takeover of Whole Foods Market highlights the growing role of technology in the global grocery industry.

The US giant is said to be considering the introduction of systems to eliminate cashiers in Whole Foods stores and trademarks approved last month also suggest that blueprint will be coming to the UK.

Tesco's systems fault is the second to hit Britain's big grocers this month, after a recent failing at rival J Sainsbury forced the company to delay or cancel deliveries from almost a third of its stores.

– (Additional reporting: Bloomberg)