Overnight, the freezers stopped keeping food cold. In shops across six European countries, temperatures inside fridges and freezer cabinets climbed sharply while most people were asleep, and by morning staff were throwing away food that could no longer be trusted. Retailers and refrigeration specialists believe the systems were attacked — the second time in about three weeks Europe’s supermarket cold chain has been hit.
The affected countries were Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands and Estonia. The heaviest impact so far appears to be in Belgium and Luxembourg, where around 40 Delhaize supermarkets reported problems. Carrefour said 15 of its Belgian stores were affected but stayed open. In Ireland, 13 SuperValu shops were hit, limited, according to owner Musgrave Group, to one refrigerator model. In Sweden, Coop said six or seven of its 800 stores were affected, while ICA said a small number of its stores outside its central network were involved.
One clear account came from southern Sweden. At an ICA store in Sjöbo, staff found freezers blowing hot air and controls unresponsive. The store’s manager, Rickard Nilsson, told the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet: “We can’t regulate the temperature, we can’t change it. Hot air is getting into the freezers. Everything is ruined.” The store later reopened to customers.
In Belgium, the pattern was the same, only larger. Ahold Delhaize, the Dutch retail group behind Delhaize, described an “IT incident” affecting fridges and freezers in dozens of its supermarkets in Belgium and Luxembourg. Its spokesperson, Sarah De Meester, confirmed that cooling temperatures had increased and said an investigation was under way. Belgian media reported dozens more outlets affected, including five Spar supermarkets and several Shop & Go and Proxy Delhaize shops. One Delhaize branch in Hoeilaart told the newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws it had lost €100,000 worth of food. Local media put the total food thrown away across the affected countries in the millions of euros.
The method, as described by the people called out to fix it, points to remote interference rather than a simple breakdown. Stephan Moelans, chief executive of the Belgian refrigeration company Sabcobel, which operates Delhaize’s systems, said the affected units had their evaporators switched into defrost mode, which makes them warm up. His teams began mobilising technicians at 1 a.m. and spent the night disconnecting affected equipment from the network. He described the incident as a cyber-attack, and said some units needed physical modifications, not just a software update. In the Netherlands, a Danfoss spokesperson told Dutch public radio NOS that the systems of at least 17 companies had been attacked overnight, including butcher shops and small stores.
Not every chain used the same language. Some spoke of an “IT incident” or a malfunction, and some said they had no immediate information that their systems had been attacked. Belgium’s and Sweden’s national cyber-security agencies said they were monitoring the situation, and Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre said it was working with international partners, with no incidents reported in the UK. Nobody has been named as responsible, and it is not known whether the same people were behind the earlier wave.
That earlier wave is why this one matters beyond the spoiled stock. In October, around 700 French supermarkets were hit when hackers took control of refrigeration units and pushed temperatures from as low as -27°C to well above 50°C, causing food losses and, in some stores, fires. The Paris prosecutor opened a formal investigation, and investigators found attackers had disabled alarm systems before adjusting thermostats or stretching defrost programmes by hours. The targeted hardware included older Danfoss controllers running outdated firmware.
Why this matters is not the price of a ruined freezer cabinet. Supermarket refrigeration is part of a country’s food infrastructure, and it runs on internet-connected controllers — convenient to manage remotely, and, as two waves in three weeks now show, reachable remotely too. A single weak point, repeated across hundreds of shops and several countries, can empty chilled shelves overnight without anyone breaking a door. This second wave will test whether retailers actually closed the gap after October — by updating old equipment, or, where updates are no longer possible, by taking it offline — before a third wave makes the question moot. The same lesson ran through another incident this week, when emergency-alert apps in Ukraine and Russia were hacked to send false nuclear warnings: systems people rely on daily are only as trustworthy as the software guarding them.
For shoppers, the immediate effect was empty chillers and closed freezer sections. For the industry, the harder question is attribution and prevention. Until investigators establish who was behind this disruption and which weakness was exploited in each country, every chain running similar equipment is left guessing whether its own freezers are next.
