Nick Scali is investigating a cyberattack that led the furniture seller to take its systems offline and left frustrated customers in the dark about missing or delayed deliveries.
Following enquiries from this masthead, the company confirmed to the ASX it had been hit by a “security incident” and was working on bringing parts of its network back online.
“We note that the company is continuing to complete sales orders and deliveries. Our response times to customers are currently slower than normal,” Nick Scali said in a statement.
The company said there was no evidence of unauthorised access to customer data, and has referred the matter to Federal Police and the Australian Cyber Security Centre, the statement said.
Nick Scali boss Anthony Scali said the incident happened “about mid-last week” and that staff were referring to manual records to get in touch with customers whose orders had been impacted.
“The system got attacked, like everyone else,” Scali told this masthead. “We kept orders going, but I guess the recovery was not as easy as we first thought. Everything’s offline. We’re bringing some components back up now … Shouldn’t be too long.”
Nick Scali’s main website or social media accounts didn’t contain any information about the outage. Customers would have to navigate to the “My account” page to find a notification of the incident.
“We’re currently experiencing a system outage with recovery underway,” the notification states.
“We’re still operating as normal and delivering, however, certain processes have been slowed down so response times have increased. We ask for your patience during this period, and we will get back to you.”
Melbourne resident and Nick Scali customer Bill Bariamis said he had not received any communication about the outage after staying home last Monday for the expected delivery of a dining table, which never arrived. He received a notification advising delivery had been rescheduled to Wednesday, but it didn’t arrive on that day either.
Bariamis visited Nick Scali’s Frankston store, where he bought the table, and was told by apologetic store staff that there had been a “major outage of computers and telephones for the last week”, but the employees did not have any further details to share.
“There are people all over the country waiting around for stuff,” he said. “No delivery, no update, no information, no nothing.”
The $1.4 billion retailer, which has 132 stores around the world, on Friday reported a 22.1 per cent jump in full-year net profits to $75.7 million, but made no mention of any security incident.
A customer service representative contacted through Nick Scali’s phone line earlier on Thursday said the company had suffered a “nationwide outage” impacting the company mainframe that would take “a couple of weeks” to resolve.
“We can’t get emails or phone calls to stores, and we can’t retrieve our orders,” the representative said. “That’s all the information I have.”
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Jessica Yun is a business reporter covering retail and food for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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