Marks and Spencer cyber attack: How long will its online ordering be down - as it loses potentially more than £3m a day

First reported over the Easter weekend, the hack has caused chaos for the retailer - not only are customers unable to place orders online, but it has had to stop its hiring programme and empty shelves have been spotted across the country as its logistics system has been affected. At first even contactless payments were knocked out, but these were quickly restored.

When will Marks & Spencer online ordering come back?

The most recent update from the company, on Friday, said staff were working “day and night” to manage it and were hoping to be back to normal “as quickly as possible” - while simultaneously urging customers to visit stores in person. No timeframe has been given.

How much has Marks & Spencer lost in sales because of the cyber attack?

It’s difficult to say exactly how much the company will lose from the outage - the website is still working, so is still acting like a catalogue rather than a platform for ordering - and it will be difficult to quantify how many people who would have ordered online will have visited a store instead.

But having said that, a look at Marks & Spencer’s most recent annual report, released in September last year, does give some indicators of how big a hole this outage will punch in its revenues.

The report says that up to the end of the 2023/24 financial year, in its clothing and home departments, M&S saw £1,268.4m - so £1,268,400,000 or £1.27bn - online sales, with more than 9m customers and more than 33m transactions. Using the blunt tool of averaging out the online sales per day (and with 2024 being a leap year), that gives a figure of £3,465,573 in clothing and home sales alone every day.

At time of writing, the cyber attack had been going on for 18 days - so the company could have lost £62.5m from clothing and home sales alone so far. But to stress again, this does not take into account the number of people who will have visited a store instead of ordering online.

The in-store comparison for clothing and home sales is £2,642.3m - £2,642,300,000, or £2.64bn - for the financial year before last, so was still much higher.

M&S Food reports its sales through Ocado Retail so does not include them in its annual financial reports.

Has Marks & Spencer’s share price been affected?

Marks & Spencer shares fell again this week. Based on share price, the retailer has lost more than 12 per cent of its value - about £1.05bn - since the cyber attack.

Analysts at Deutsche Bank estimate the attack is costing M&S £15m in lost profits a week.