Supermarkets will be able to take deliveries of essential supplies after hours, to help restock shelves following the major disruption caused by Friday’s CrowdStrike outage.

The global incident impacted local retail outlets and forced many shopping centres and supermarkets to close. The State’s supply chain is still in the process of recovering and responding to the outage.

Normal delivery systems and schedules of major grocery stores remain interrupted, resulting in low stock levels and the supply of essential goods in some stores.

The impact is predominantly on fresh produce, such as fruit and vegetables, milk, eggs, flour, pasta, rice as well as shelf items like toilet paper and laundry products.

As supermarkets and retail outlets work to return services to normal, the South Australian Government is encouraging local councils to be flexible and ease any planning restrictions that may apply to the delivery of goods.

The Government has written to all councils in South Australia, encouraging them to allow supermarkets to receive deliveries outside of specified work hours.

Under the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Act 2016, individual shopping centres and supermarkets are restricted to only receiving deliveries during specified timeframes to reduce impacts to surrounding homes and businesses.

These designated work hours vary for every individual supermarket or shopping centre based on the specific development approvals.

It is understood it will take one to two weeks for supply chains to return to normal and follows similar curfew flexibility in other States, like Victoria and New South Wales.

There will be no impact on the hours supermarkets or shopping centres remain open to the public.

Quotes

Attributable to Nick Champion

The major CrowdStrike outage caused significant disruption to supermarket supply chains for essential items such as fresh fruit and vegetables.

We are encouraging councils to be flexible during this period so we can return to normal supply levels as soon as possible.

These changes won’t have any impact on supermarket opening hours and are only expected to remain in place for the next fortnight.

Attributable to Dean Johnson, LGA President

We understand the challenges the recent CrowdStrike outage has posed to our supply chains, and councils can help ease curfew restrictions as a practical step to support local retailers.

Councils can work with supermarkets to facilitate these temporary after-hours changes, while minimising neighbourhood impact.

By giving reprieve to normal curfews over the next two weeks, heavy vehicles will have flexibility to make up for disrupted delivery schedules, ensuring essential stocks and fresh produce can be replenished.