Source: NL Times
European businesses now have a hard number for what a serious cyberattack costs a large retailer. Ahold Delhaize, the parent company of Albert Heijn, Delhaize, Etos, Gall & Gall and Bol, said on 4 November 2026 that the cyberattack it suffered in October will reduce its fourth quarter net sales by an estimated 200 to 250 million euros and its underlying operating profit by 75 to 100 million euros, before counting the cost of the response and recovery work.
What the company disclosed
The grocery group published the figures alongside its third quarter results. It confirmed that the October incident forced it to proactively take systems offline, leaving the websites and apps of Albert Heijn, Gall & Gall and Etos unreachable for days. For nearly two weeks Albert Heijn could not fulfil online orders, restock shelves properly or display correct prices on its electronic shelf labels, and online orders were also disrupted at the American chains Food Lion and Giant Food.
Chief executive Frans Muller said most of the disruption was contained within two weeks but work continues to fully restore normal operations, and he described cyber threats as an increasingly harsh reality of doing business today. The company cut its full year outlook as a result, lowering expected underlying earnings per share growth at constant exchange rates from 4 to 9 percent to 1 to 3 percent. The group was hit again on Monday 3 November when attackers targeted refrigeration systems, part of the wider wave of fridge and freezer attacks affecting European supermarkets. No one has claimed responsibility for any of these attacks.
Why the number matters
Most organisations never learn what a breach actually costs, because few victims disclose it. Ahold Delhaize has done the market and every European IT leader a favour by publishing a quantified impact: revenue lost while systems were deliberately shut down, profit lost with it, plus recovery costs that sit outside the headline figures. The incident is also a reminder that the decision to disconnect compromised systems is itself a business continuity event, which is why rehearsed, tested incident response and recovery plans are as important as prevention.
If you want to know what a similar outage would do to your revenue and how to reduce that exposure, contact the team at Excello Digital for a professional security and resilience assessment.