Will Marks and Spencer survive?

[MerryPortas]

It’s hard to imagine the full scale of the cyber attack and the impact on their business.

yes, annoying for the shoppers, but they must be losing millions in daily revenue online, and I doubt that’s being backfilled by increased physical footfall.

stock levels are unpredictable - understandably - so confidence is low.

shoppers are creatures of habit, and change is habit forming.

So my question is, do you think M and S is at risk?

I think you need to expand on that, if speaking English is the indicator of the best hackers there are plenty of other countries that might qualify 😀

Certainly, the point I was making was that the threat using English doesn't narrow the field much.

I've missed something, I don't know which post you meant to quote, I didn't know that the M and S hackers were now speaking to people. Is that customers or M and S itself?

The part I was commenting was talking about huge hack and data loss recently, and someone said the hack being in English meant it couldn't come from the non-English speaking world-which is untrue.

Are they back in the UK? Still offline in Ireland, I checked last night. I really need something i can't seem to get anywhere else and they don't have it in stock in my local store.

Edited to add, while I feel really bad for them, I'm not sure it was handled well. When I drove to the shop looking for a specific thing and asked if they could call me if it came in again, I was told 'no sorry we don't have a phone'. Surely someone could get a note pad and pen and a cheap phone for staff to help a customer? When I went home I went online to their competitors (although didn't get what I needed) but would have done.

Similar to how huge numbers of businesses discovered their insurers wouldn't pay out during covid despite having pandemic cover! Now pandemic cover is often specifically excluded.

I'd imagine during a cyber attack calling one customer to tell them an item was in store wasn't top of the to do list

Store counter staff weren't the ones dealing with the cyber attack and restoring the IT systems!

But, yes, it's unreasonable to expect stores to "phone" when they have stock in - it's why they created the IT systems in the first place.

But M&S havn't covered themselves in glory with how they've handled it. They should have thrown van loads of stock out to the shops when the online system failed, but havn't done that. So people going into stores have been faced with empty shelves and "unpopular" colours & sizes whilst their warehouses were full of stock. Even now, they've not got the stock out to the shops. We went into a town centre store last weekend and the shelves were still mostly empty - that's several weeks later. They're not just losing sales from the online website, they're losing sales from stores too because the stock isn't in the right places.

Still not online in Ireland, after this amount of time and inconvenience (and lack of prioritisation of the Irish?!) I have fully defected to Next. That's after 40+ years of M&S.