Mitre 10's website crashes: Customers frustrated as outage drags into third day

Mitre 10's website this morning.

Some Mitre 10 customers have taken to social media to vent over a website outage that has now dragged on for days - making life difficult for Aucklanders locked down in level 3 who only have click-and-collect as a buying option.

LATEST: 'No security breach' says Mitre 10 as multi-day website outage grinds on

"This is quite an outage 3 days now, any idea when we can expect to see it back up? This must be really hurting the franchisees in Auckland", Chris Rust posted to the company's Facebook page this morning.

"STILL down?! Think you need a new IT team!," Rob Ford weighed in.

Rust and Ford were just two of 137 who left mostly furious comments after a post by Mitre 10 on its Facebook page on Sunday, which read:

"We're experiencing an outage on our website which unfortunately means our website and online orders are currently unavailable. Our team are working urgently to get things back up and running, and have you back to your projects around the home and garden.
Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause, we hope to get this resolved as soon as possible and will let you know once it's sorted. Thanks for your understanding."

The chain has now put a form online where want-to-be click-and-collect shoppers can leave their name and details, plus a description of a product or its SKU (stock keeping unit) number - if they somehow know it without access to Mitre 10's website.

On Geekzone, user "Wonderferret" said: "It's been up and down since Friday. Most of the weekend there was a banner message saying they couldn't process online orders :-(".

In July this year, Mitre 10 offered details of a major technology upgrade in partnership with the multinational SAP.

"Mitre 10 is two years into the project which encompasses SAP core retail processing, HRIS and two commerce cloud websites. The project is more than a technology implementation, though; there is a parallel workstream working towards Mitre 10's target operating model – so that Mitre 10 has the organisational capability to leverage the significant investment," a rep for Mitre 10 said in July.

"It's a high risk/high reward strategy to undertake such a significant programme while the business has been trading at Christmas volumes for more than a year. This has put pressure on aging legacy systems. Not to mention the tight labour market for retail and for the project."

Today, the cause was not clear.

The Herald asked Mitre 10 if the attack was the result of a tech glitch, a cyber attack or another factor.

A spokeswoman offered only the general comment: "We're experiencing technical issues with our website and online ordering is temporarily unavailable. Our teams are working with urgency to resolve the back-end issues and get the site back up and running as soon as possible."