Hours of downtime

“Only cash is king” was the motto at the warehouse

Some warehouse locations suffered from problems with IT servers from Munich, at least on Friday morning.

(Bild: P. Huber)

Customers at the St. Peter an der Au (Lower Austria) warehouse reported long queues of people, no control over stock levels, disgruntled employees with calculators and cash-only payments. Many other warehouse locations are also likely to have been affected. The responsible director of the Amstetten warehouse sees an "IT problem, as is now the case everywhere else".

Not only the home and garden market in St. Peter an der Au, but also many other locations, such as petrol stations and supermarkets in the large warehouse network, are said to have been affected. These were the reports that reached the "Krone" on Friday afternoon. Long queues of customers were reported at the store in the Amstetten district.

Employees "armed" with calculators
"They have no overview of the stock levels and sit at the checkout with a calculator. They can't even print out invoices professionally," described a customer who had been shopping there that morning.

Another customer reports that this has been the case since around 4 p.m. on Thursday and that the flow of customers is much slower. "They're still open, much to the annoyance of the staff," he says. The only option now is to pay with cash. "Luckily we still have some cash with us, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to pay for our smaller purchases either!"

Congratulations if cash is to be abolished. But then everything really does stand in such situations!

Ein mostviertler Kunde

"Failure was not a problem"
Gerhard Kamleithner, director of the responsible warehouse in Amstetten, only confirms that the IT outage occurred at around 9 a.m. on Friday and lasted for around three hours. "It was a failure of our servers in Munich. Many warehouse locations were affected," says Kamleithner, emphasizing that this also occurred at petrol stations and so on. He was unable to say how large or how many locations were affected in total.

"The fact that IT problems can occur today is no longer a rarity and we hear about it everywhere. We have a contingency plan for this and everything worked," emphasizes the Managing Director. Unfortunately, bank transfer payments and the like could no longer be accepted, but every customer would have received a normal invoice, says the warehouse manager. "Our employees coped with it, it wasn't a problem for them at all," says Kamleithner. 

An inquiry at the country's largest warehouse in Zwettl revealed that there were no problems at the main site and everything worked. Raiffeisen Ware Austria could no longer be reached for information on Friday afternoon.