The wholesale distributor of stationary and office supplies owned by Staples is experiencing what they deemed as an outage in their systems, which has been going on for days and has affected customers and suppliers from ordering online.
The Outage
Not only is the outage affecting the company's customers and suppliers, but it was also reported that its freight carriers' pick-ups have been halted until things are resolved. The issue started around the evening of March 6th, 2023.
The company has not yet revealed how the outage started, so it is unclear whether it was caused by a cyber attack or the company's system is experiencing a technical issue. Regardless, the issue is likely to cause a disruption in the supply chain.
The company is based in Deerfield, Illinois, and is serving around 30,000 resellers. Their items include traditional office products, office furniture, janitorial and breakroom supplies, and technology products.
Although Essendant has been putting in the effort to continue its operations, the outage is still preventing customers from placing orders or contacting the distributor's customer care service. Customers were notified of the outage the next day after it was discovered.
There were orders that have been shipped on March 6th, 2023, but the company did not provide an advanced shipment notice (ASN). Essendant will work on the missing ASN, but the process may take several days, as mentioned in Bleeping Computer.
As for the orders that have not been shipped after the outage occurred, the company has canceled them. Customers will be notified by the ASN indicating that they were manually marked out, which is one of two ways.
The second is that the customer will receive a report from the company's team regarding the cancellation, wherein the process will take several days. Essendant mentioned that additional shipments should be withheld as they will not be able to receive anything in route.
Essendant told its customers that they should not contact the company about the affected orders' status. The company is still not able to place purchase orders in the next few days, but they anticipated that it will resume on the next scheduled purchase order date.
Essendant Resolving the Issue
The company's update says that there has been additional progress over the weekend regarding its planned operational recovery efforts. They expressed that they are working "expeditiously" to bring their systems back online.
They have also successfully tested select systems, which would allow the company to resolve issues with the orders that were not processed due to the outage. Essendant has already begun looking into executing its initial clean-up efforts.
Still, the company's update still mentioned that the effort to resolve the delays may still take several days to complete. However, the company is preparing its next phase of systems that will allow them to have limited "pick, pack, and ship capabilities" for certain orders.
The efforts for the next phase will also be taking several days. The company said that it might take this entire week before they can be completely operational. They will provide more details on its directional timeline to make the customers aware of its next steps.
