Supermarket fridges and freezers in seven European countries hit by a co-ordinated cyber-attack

2 November 2026

Fridges and freezers in dozens of supermarkets across seven European countries stopped cooling after the software that runs them was attacked.
Thermostats were raised from a distance and, in some shops, the air inside freezers reached 50 degrees Celsius, so stock had to be destroyed.
Around forty Delhaize stores in Belgium and Luxembourg were affected; a few shops were hit in Sweden, in Ireland, in the Netherlands, in Estonia and in Finland.
The Belgian manufacturer Sabcobel, which builds some of the units, said their evaporators had been put into defrost mode and so warmed up.
It said the same trick had been used on French supermarkets three weeks earlier, where food worth millions of euros was lost.
A software update is not enough, the firm said: the units need a physical change, and most of its customers have moved to running the appliances over a secure internet link.
The Belgian and Swedish cyber-security agencies said they were watching the incident, and the United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre said it was working with partners abroad and with industry.
Separately, American authorities are looking at refrigeration failures at several military bases in August to see whether they belong to the same pattern.