Hundreds of customers using supermarket retailer ASDA’s online shopping website were overcharged following a power outage at a US data centre.
ASDA’s e-commerce systems are at least partially hosted at the Arkansas data centre of WalMart, the US retail giant that acquired the company in 1999.
"A power cut at our computer servers in the US has resulted in a temporary system error on the home delivery website," ASDA said in a statement.
"As soon as we became aware of the overcharging issue we contacted the customers affected and we are working hard to refund the overcharge and any resulting bank charges."
"Our initial investigation has shown that this was an isolated incident, but steps are being put in place to make doubly sure it doesn’t happen again."
As well as reimbursing affected customers for being overcharged, ASDA will also credit their accounts for the full value of the affected order.
An ASDA spokesperson told Information Age that the incident only lasted for a few hours. They could not explain why a data centre outage might result in overcharging.
WalMart’s 125,000 square foot Arkansas data centre was built in 2004, and is located 15 miles away from the company’s corporate headquarters. The company is currently building a new data centre in Colorado.
