Canadian Tire‘s website is back up and running after an outage lasting at least seven hours.
Shoppers heading to the website on Thursday were greeted by a blank page and the message, “Canadiantire.ca is currently experiencing technical difficulties. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Please try again later.”
The retailer’s official Twitter account tweeted apologetic responses to inquiries from dozens of frustrated web users until the website was confirmed restored at 7:14 p.m. ET. The site was back up and running in Ontario, a couple of hours before that.
It’s not the first time Canadiantire.ca has been plagued by website woes this year. In early February, the company blocked customers with loyalty accounts from logging on to the website after a security breach that may have resulted in customer information being stolen.
READ MORE: Canadian Tire admits 5 days after breach customer info may have been ‘accessed’
There was no security concern this time around, according to a Canadian Tire spokesperson who said the website crashed “due to equipment failure during routine maintenance.”
Rob Howes, a cyber security consultant and vice president of CodeEye Solutions, told Global News that there are usually only two reasons why a company’s website might not work — “a technical issue with the back-end infrastructure or a security concern such as a DDoS attack or advanced threat.”
— With files from Global News consumer reporter Sean O’Shea
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