An “IT issue” has been blamed for a nation-wide outage that saw Woolworths supermarkets brought to a standstill on Monday.

3AW Drive was bombarded with calls about register outages at Woolworths in Drouin, Endeavour Hills, Swan Hill and Essendon.

Shoppers were being forced to abandon their trolleys.

It soon emerged the problem was all over Australia.

Woolworths released the following statement:

“We can confirm that an IT issue impacted registers in our supermarkets for a short period of time this afternoon.”

“The registers are now back online in all our stores.”

“We apologise for the inconvenience this caused our customers.”

Rose from Hoppers Crossing on Woolworths outages:
“Everyone was walking out of the store empty handed. Staff were very apologetic. Staff said every register in every store nation wide has shut down. We were all offered a box of chocolates.” @3AW693

— Brianna Travers (@briannatravers) April 16, 2018