The Empire Company announced on Monday that some of its brand stores across Canada including Sobeys, Lawtons, Safeway, Farm Boy, IGA, Foodland, and FreshCo are facing disruptions in service due to an information technology systems issue. The technical issues the company is currently facing prevented its pharmacies from filling prescriptions and some services have been delayed and functioned only intermittently. 

A press has been released from the company in which it assured its customers that they are working to patch the glitches, however, the company further added that they are not sure when all services will be restored. "At Sobeys, exceeding the needs of our customers is always our top priority. Our sole focus right now is on getting this problem rectified and we will provide further updates as relevant information becomes available," said chief operating officer Pierre St-Laurent in the news release. 

Additionally, pharmacy staff reported to the press that they could not access their systems. However, the staff supplied its customers with a few days' medications if customers came with their empty bottles. 

Meanwhile, Maple Leaf Foods announced on Sunday that the disruption has been caused by a "cybersecurity incident". 

The organization reported that the issues came to be known over the weekend and immediately the company with its researchers, recovery experts, information systems professionals, and third-party specialists started working to investigate the outage. 

Following the incident, Sylvain Charlebois, the director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, disclosed that he received a number of messages from people on Friday night about problems at Empire, including copies of internal company letters. 

"The entire food system works on the basis that computers will communicate with each other. So as soon as you have a cyberattack disrupting the efficiency of supply chains, costs could go up. Even worse, access to food could also become a problem. You could see many stores without supplies for days and you don't want that to happen," he further added.