M&S shoppers fury as many of their favourite products including Colin the Caterpillar are STILL unavailable on the website after cyber attack

Daily Mail​

4 hours ago

Shoppers have been furious after they are still unable to buy items like sports bras, jeans and even Colin the Caterpillar.
Some items such as Clinique foundation and Wrangler jeans as well some Reebok sports bras and Colin the Caterpillar birthday cake are among the thousands of products yet to be available more than two months after a cyberattack crippled the major retailer's website.
Although the retailer has recently brought back a limited selection of third-party brands like Adidas, Columbia, and Lilybod, many ranges are still missing or offering only limited stock.
Delivery times for customers in England, Scotland, and Wales have now been cut from ten days to five, but click-and-collect and next-day delivery remain unavailable.
Meanwhile, shoppers in Northern Ireland still can't get home delivery at all, according to The Times.
The sluggish recovery has left customers questioning the delay.
The website was down for 51 days, and although it is now back online, service remains far from normal.
Before the cyberattack, the average recovery time following a cyberattack was just 22 days, according to research published last year, making this incident one of the most prolonged online outages in recent retail memory.
M&S have said that its full range of products as well as normal delivery times will be returning 'over the coming weeks' did not elaborate on how many of those are back online.
A source told the newspaper that it is more than a half.
An expert has said 'an abundance of caution' may be behind the delay, with the retail likely to be rebuilding its systems from scratch rather than trying to save its existing software.
Professor Alan Woodward of the University of Surrey said: 'They probably did this because the criminals are very good at building malware that can persist and hide in little nooks and crannies on your network.'
He suggests that the tech team working with the retail giant is probably going 'the extra mile' as the brand's reputation is on the line.
When approached, a source told the newspaper: 'The last thing we want to do is let customers down, promising to fulfil an order in a specific timescale and then not do it.'
The retailer continues to insist that its recovery is ahead of schedule, although Prof Woodward said he is surprised at the delay.
Since relaunching the site, the retailer's main focus appears to be restocking summer clothing, likely in a bid to clear a backlog of unsold seasonal stock before the sunshine disappears.