Thousands of shoppers were unable to access their orders and the app of one of Britain’s biggest grocery giants.

Asda’s website went down for thousands across the country, leaving shoppers unable to access their orders or place new ones.

The majority of the problems appeared to be with the app, with over 1,000 complaints registered on DownDetector.

The outage is affected those in Manchester, Nottingham, London, Glasgow, Plymouth and Birmingham.

Issues first arose around 3pm this afternoon, but appear to also be with the company’s website.

An Asda spokesperson: ‘Due to a global issue affecting multiple businesses, our online shopping website was unavailable for approximately an hour earlier today.

‘We apologise for any inconvenience caused and we would like to reassure our customers that they are now able to shop with us as normal.’

The outage came after Asda announced it would trial a new self-service returns ‘drop box’ which allows shoppers to return unwanted or faulty items without speaking to anyone.

The trial is currently taking place at the Ashton-under-Lyne supermarket in Greater Manchester, and everything from grocery items and clothing, to electrical products can be returned via the machines.

Customers simply have to scan their receipts and the product’s barcode before depositing their return into either a cupboard (for groceries and electrical goods), or into a bin (clothing).

Alexander Lacy, Asda’s senior manager – retail front end service, said in a LinkedIn post that the changes would help reduce ‘queue times’ at customer service desks in-store, which were a ‘key pinch point’ for shoppers.

He added that a simple return via the machine should only take ‘around 30 seconds’. Pretty neat, huh?

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