Staples confirms cyberattack disrupting deliveries

Office supplies giant Staples has confirmed a cybersecurity incident, saying its mitigation efforts have impacted its delivery and customer service activities.

Staples said the company identified a “cybersecurity risk,” prompting it to take steps to mitigate the impact and protect customer data. According to the statement, mitigation efforts were the reason why some of Staples’ systems have been offline.

“Our prompt efforts caused temporary disruption to the staples.com processing and delivering capabilities, as well as to our communications channels and customer service lines,” Staples said.

The retailer’s response came after multiple posts in Reddit threads populated with Staples employees complaining about the company’s systems being down.

“Everything still down. Was it a hack? Ransomware? Any word about tomorrow?” one user lamented.

Employees allegedly said that the outage encompassed several Staples systems, such as email, phone, and human resource systems. According to one employee, a supervisor advised them to skip a day’s work and come back later.

Disruptions that affect multiple company systems could indicate a ransomware attack. However, there’s no confirmation of that so far. The company will most likely launch an investigation, which should reveal whether any customer or employee data was accessed during the incident.