Hackers Turned Europe's Supermarket Freezers Up to 50°C — Overnight, in Seven Countries

By TaazaPulse News Desk · Published: 30 October 2026 · TaazaPulse News Desk

QUICK ANSWER. Yes, it really happened. Overnight on 1–2 November 2026, suspected hackers remotely tampered with the refrigeration controllers of supermarkets in seven European countries — Belgium, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ireland, the Netherlands, Estonia and Finland — switching freezer units into defrost mode and pushing some temperatures to 50°C. Around 60 stores were hit in Belgium alone, 13 SuperValu stores in Ireland, and Swedish chains ICA and Coop confirmed attacks. A viral Facebook post by Pakistani commentator Rauf Klasra reported the story to Pakistani audiences and got almost all of it right — except one detail: the "13 stores" were in Ireland, not Belgium. This is the full verified account.

1. The night Europe's freezers were turned into heaters

It began, as these attacks now seem to begin, in the middle of the night — the hours when a supermarket has machines, alarms and nobody watching them.

According to Sabcobel, the Belgian refrigeration company that maintains Delhaize's cooling systems, the tampering started around midnight on the night of Sunday 1 November into Monday 2 November. Its technicians were mobilised from about 1 a.m. At roughly 3 a.m., alarms began sounding at the De Laet & Van Haver butcher chain in Belgium. At about 4 a.m., Delhaize — Belgium's best-known supermarket group — sent a text message to its store managers warning of a sudden temperature rise. In Sweden, the attack on one Stockholm ICA franchise store struck at 2 a.m. and was only noticed hours later.

What staff found on Monday morning, across at least seven countries, was the same scene with local variations: refrigeration and freezer units that had stopped cooling and started warming. The attackers had not smashed anything. They had simply logged in — from outside, over the internet — and changed the settings. Sabcobel's chief executive Stefan Molans said the intruders had systematically switched the units' evaporators into defrost mode, the setting a freezer uses briefly to melt ice off its own coils. Left there for hours, a freezer becomes a slow oven.

Stores pulled chilled and frozen food from sale immediately. In Sweden, frozen goods were loaded into shopping carts and wheeled out to be thrown away. Shoppers at Belgian stores found cordoned-off aisles and apology notices: "Due to cyberattacks, there will be no products on the refrigerated or freezer shelves." Carrefour Belgium's spokesman Mich Vergauwen was blunt: "It's a cyber-attack, there is no other reason." Ahold Delhaize, more cautiously, called it an overnight "IT incident" — and then disconnected the cooling systems of its stores from the internet altogether.

No one has claimed responsibility. Reuters could not establish who was behind Monday's attacks, or whether they were linked to the attack on France three weeks earlier. Belgium's federal prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation.

2. Country by country: where the cold chain broke

Belgium was hit hardest. A Delhaize spokesperson said about forty of its stores, in both Flanders and Wallonia, were affected — worst hit were the small formats: Shop & Go stores beside Q8 petrol stations, Delhaize Proxy shops and motorway stores. Carrefour counted fifteen of its 700 Belgian stores affected shortly after 9 a.m. Colruyt Group said five Spar shops run under its franchise system had their fridge systems attacked. An IKEA branch in Mons was also hit. Inside Belgian freezers, temperatures climbed to about 15°C — frozen food must be held at −18°C or colder — and at the De Laet butcher's, fridges reached 18°C. The chain's founder, Luc De Laet, woken at 3:30 a.m., estimated €15,000 (about $16,800) of ruined meat at his store south of Antwerp alone. Belgian media put the food thrown away across the country at roughly €100,000. "It's very scary," De Laet told Reuters. "They are hacking the system that is doing the registration of the temperature, and they can program it at a distance."

Sweden produced the number that travelled the world: 50 degrees. The ICA Kvantum store in Sjöbo, in the far south, posted on Facebook that its fridges and freezers had been "hacked" overnight and set to 50°C (122°F). Engla Ingwall, sales manager at an ICA franchise store in Stockholm, told Reuters during a visit to the emptied store: "Everything is destroyed… There has been a cyberattack and all our freezers reached 50 degrees (Celsius)." ICA's head office confirmed a "limited number of stores" were affected. Coop, Sweden's other big grocer, said seven of its roughly 800 stores were hit by unauthorised tampering with their refrigeration systems. The Times reported some Swedish units at 50–55°C. Sweden's National Cyber Security Centre is investigating.

Ireland is where the "13 stores" figure belongs. Wholesaler Musgrave said the incident affected systems in 13 of its SuperValu stores, forcing it to remove some chilled and frozen products from sale. Reporting by Irish broadcaster RTÉ added that a specific model of refrigerator used in some SuperValu stores appeared to have been targeted. Musgrave later said the incident was resolved, all stores were operating normally and shelves were being restocked. "Our monitoring systems alerted us to the issue and we took immediate action," it said.

Luxembourg was affected through Ahold Delhaize: the group said the overnight incident hit freezers in several stores in Belgium and a few in Luxembourg, while stressing that distribution centres ran normally and deliveries were not disrupted. Estonia's Selver chain was also hit — technology supplier Kitman Coldtech told public broadcaster ERR that temperatures there were likewise set to 50°C. The Netherlands and Finland complete the list of seven countries in The Times' count. Italy's cyber agency also logged same-night tampering at Coop stores in Palermo and Catania, according to Italian reporting, though those cases have not been tied to the main wave by wire services.

3. The viral post, checked line by line

By Tuesday morning in Pakistan, the story had reached hundreds of thousands of people through a Facebook post by commentator Rauf Klasra, under the headline "Cyber attacks in Europe — supermarket fridges and cooling systems destroyed." Because TaazaPulse checks what it amplifies, here is that post against the record:

One post, six claims: five confirmed outright, one with the right number pinned to the wrong country. That is a better strike rate than most viral news — but the Belgian figure matters, because the truth is bigger than the post suggested, not smaller.

4. How do you hack a fridge?

The uncomfortable answer is: the same way you log into any badly protected web page.

Modern supermarkets do not have a man with a wrench watching each freezer. They have refrigeration controllers — small industrial computers, very often made by the Danish firm Danfoss (its AK-SC and AK-SM series) — that run the compressors, log temperatures and let engineers adjust settings remotely over the internet. That convenience is the vulnerability. At least some of the units hit on Monday used Danfoss technology that was also targeted in France, and Danfoss says it has been working with customers to implement fixes.

Security researchers had mapped this door long before anyone walked through it. Claroty's Team82 had disclosed multiple flaws in Danfoss controllers, including one (catalogued as CVE-2025-41450) that could grant access to the device's web management interface, and another (CVE-2025-41451) allowing remote code execution. On 2 November, researchers at security firm Previdian reported watching an IP address fire repeated login attempts at their decoy Danfoss systems using factory-default credentials that are publicly documented. Censys' ARC research team noted the European attacks matched the French ones "in both timing, targeting, and execution — early morning temperature adjustments meant employees were least likely to be able to immediately respond."

And once inside, the attacker does not need malware at all. In the French attack, investigators found defrost cycles stretched from one hour to eight — while the built-in alarms, which report through the same compromised controller, stayed silent. The machine that takes the temperature is also the machine that reports it; corrupt the witness, and nobody knows the food is cooking. As SentinelOne researcher Tom Hegel told Reuters: "An attacker who logs into an exposed control panel leaves almost nothing behind… A teenager and an intelligence service would look much the same from the defender's side." Hegel noted that the absence of any ransom demand points away from extortion and towards sabotage.

5. France was the warning — and the pattern is older than France

Three weeks before Monday's wave, on the night of 11–12 October 2026, attackers remotely seized refrigeration controllers at up to 700 French supermarkets and independent stores — E.Leclerc, Intermarché and Cooperative U among them. Temperatures were driven from as low as −27°C to well above 50°C. Fires were reported. Police put the losses in the tens of millions of euros, and France's cyber security agency CERT-FR confirmed compromises of controllers from several manufacturers, including Danfoss and Copeland/Dixell. Ahold, Delhaize's parent, separately reported a cybersecurity incident to Dutch police in October after detecting suspicious activity.

Go further back and the pattern stretches across 2026. In May, an attack on an Israeli food processor's industrial refrigeration plant reprogrammed controllers, pinned motorised valves open and destroyed three compressors — an incident the response firm Profero attributed to an Iranian state-directed group. In August, fridges at several US military bases suffered outages that NPR's sources believe were cyber-related, though the Pentagon has not officially said so. And in Britain on Monday, the National Cyber Security Centre warned retailers to update the software on fridge temperature controllers "with urgency" — while British meat suppliers were already counting losses from the same wave.

6. What officials are doing now

The political reaction was unusually direct. EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Christophe Hansen said: "They are a deliberate attempt to disrupt our food supply chain and undermine consumers' confidence in it — a warning that we must take seriously. The repeated occurrence of these cyberattacks is deeply concerning." The European Commission said the incidents show digital threats becoming increasingly disruptive. Belgium's Centre for Cybersecurity spokesperson Katrien Eggers admitted attribution may never come: "It is not known who is behind this attack, and it may never be determined," adding that AI tools now make exploiting such weaknesses easier. Belgium's federal prosecutor is investigating; Sweden's cyber centre is investigating; France's investigation from October continues.

The practical response, so far, is unglamorous and effective-looking: Delhaize has disconnected its store cooling systems from the internet — the digital equivalent of pulling the plug on the problem — while technicians reset units by hand. And Israel, though untouched, moved within a day: its National Cyber Directorate urged supermarkets, food companies and logistics centres to inspect their refrigeration systems, remove direct internet exposure, replace default passwords, update outdated systems, switch on multi-factor authentication for remote access and fit independent temperature alarms — and to report inspection results and suspicious activity to its 119 hotline. The directorate was explicit that the warning was precautionary: no attempted attack in Israel had been detected.

7. What this means for Pakistan

Pakistan's supermarkets, dairy and meat chains, pharmaceutical distributors and cold stores run on the same class of imported, internet-connected refrigeration controllers as Europe's — the technology is global even when the security habits are local. The European lesson is not that hackers are magicians; it is that a freezer controller left on the open internet, with its factory password unchanged and its alarms reporting only to itself, is an unlocked door with the keys labelled.

Three transferable lessons stand out. First, the fix list Israel issued within 24 hours — no direct internet exposure, no default passwords, updates, multi-factor access, independent temperature sensors — costs little and closes the exact hole used in France and again this week. Second, food safety rules already assume the cold chain breaks by accident; Europe has now shown it can be broken on purpose, at scale, in one night, across seven countries at once. Third, attribution may never arrive — which means defence cannot wait for proof of who is coming. Pakistan has no public record of a similar attack on its food cold chain; the value of Europe's bad week is that the warning arrived before the incident, not after.

8. The bottom line

The viral post was, in its essentials, true — rarer than it should be, and worth saying plainly. Overnight on 2 November, someone reached into the freezers of seven European countries and turned the cold off: about sixty Belgian stores, Swedish freezers at 50°C, thirteen Irish SuperValu stores (not Belgian ones), food in the bins, a criminal investigation in Brussels, an EU commissioner talking about deliberate attacks on the food supply, and Israel warning its own food industry the same day. Three weeks after France, the fridge has become what security researchers now openly call it: a new battleground. The investigation continues; this story will be updated as the official findings land.