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Woolies is down, down, after cash register failure

Retail giant Woolworths was hit by an IT failure on Monday that led to the stoppage of business at most, if not all, stores across Australia.

According to the company, the outage affected registers at its supermarkets in the afternoon, leading to what it characterised as an inability to carry out business "for a short period of time this afternoon".

By 5pm, Woolworths tweeted that all registers were back online and apologised for the outage.

Customers were asked to leave many stores after the registers failed to function.
As usual, customers took to social media to vent their frustrations and test out their ability to come up with humorous short takes.

Commenting on the outage, Sean Abbott, the country head at disaster recovery software provider Zerto, said: "According to the maths worked out by a member of the media, last year’s total sales at Woolworths were $55 billion.

"Divide that by 365 days, then by 24 hours, then by 60 minutes; for every minute the technical fault lasts, the company is losing $104,640. That’s a staggering amount to its revenue and bottom line."

Abbott added that organisations could reduce downtime by having every change to their data replicated.

"Every second of every day. This ensures true IT resilience in the event of an outage, human error or natural disaster. We live in a digital economy that requires organisations to have a 24/7 'always on' mentality and failure to think this way can lead to an organisation’s downfall," he said.

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Sam Varghese

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A professional journalist with decades of experience, Sam for nine years used DOS and then Windows, which led him to start experimenting with GNU/Linux in 1998. Since then he has written widely about the use of both free and open source software, and the people behind the code. His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.

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