A recent wave of technical failures at major brands like McDonald’s, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Greggs, attributed to untested software updates, highlights the critical need for rigorous testing in the business sector to prevent revenue losses and damage to brand reputation.
Wow. That was some weekend for business failures in the news headlines! We donât think thereâs ever been a better illustration of the importance of testing than what happened to some of the worldâs biggest brandsâŠ
Updated 20th March â Greggs, the well-known bakery chain suffered store closures and customer misery after a payment systems failureâŠmore below!
Burger breakdown
First up: on Friday, McDonalds (that small burger franchise) had an epic meltdown of systems in their restaurants. Globally. Yes, we will let that one sink in. Over 5,000 restaurants in the UK, Australia and Japan, plus other countries, suddenly stopped being able to take orders.
Cyber attack? No. A âconfiguration changeâ via a third-party provider â likely a software update â that hadnât been tested, brought the burger chain to their knees as they couldnât take orders around the world.
Supermarket Sweep-ing tech issues
Fast-forward 24 hours and two of the UKâs biggest supermarket chains, Tesco and Sainsburyâs, suffered a similar fate.
Sainsburyâs were forced to apologize to customers after most of their online grocery deliveries couldnât be delivered due to technical issues; they were also unable to offer contactless payments in store. Their tech issues later transpired to be due an overnight software update.
As if out of sympathy a key rival, Tesco, decided to have a similar issue and were forced to cancel a small number of orders.
âYou donât do a major update to your live system without making sure its going to work first.â
According to retail technology analyst Miya Knights, âif a major update was being made to a live system there needed to be rigorous testing protocols in place [and] rigorous release planningâ.
One of their customers, a computer science teaching fellow at Aston University, had this to sayâŠ
âI went on to the Tesco site and they had no deliveries slots today. People need to test software. You donât do a major update to your live system without making sure its going to work first.â
Flaky software hits Greggs
Not wanting to miss the IT action, early on Wednesday 20th March, Greggs, the bakery chain, announced theyâd been hit by an IT issue that was affecting card payments and theyâd been forced to close some stores and only accept cash paymentsâŠ
According to expert, Paul Cooper, who is Head of IT at takepayments, âLast weekend Sainsburys shared that the error in the payment systems was due to an overnight software update that encountered problems, which affected the ability to take contactless payments the next day. Although we donât know for sure, it sounds like the supermarket may not have tested the update sufficiently. Itâs important for any business to test their system updates thoroughly and to keep any updates local.â
Test today. Donât fail tomorrow.
All four firms will have experienced a drop in revenue for the affected period. Some of them may have to deal with a lot of customer complaints. Some may experience a hit on share prices. All will have experienced a negative mark against their brand experience, which they all pride themselves on.
And whatâs the conclusion of our story â when one weekend sees the chaos caused by a lack of testing when deploying config changes? Well, itâs shining through loud and clear.
Test thoroughly.
If you want to find out how you can avoid joining these three and transition to bug-free releases in less than a week, then letâs talk.
It doesnât have to be you next.
