Shares of Brazilian e-commerce giant Americanas plunge after an outage of its main websites

The company's main marketplace sites, Lojas Americanas and Submarino were offline throughout Monday

Brazilian retailer Lojas Americanas's website — Photo: Shutterstock

22.Feb.2022 11:41 BRT

Brazil‘s Americanas shares plummeted on Monday, affected by the deactivation of the group’s e-commerce websites after the company’s systems were targeted by a digital attack over the weekend.

The company’s main marketplace sites, Lojas Americanas and Submarino were offline throughout Monday, and the company suffered a loss in market value of more than BRL 2 billion, according to Refinitiv data.

The company said it had suspended part of its e-commerce platform’s servers after identifying risks of “unauthorized access” over the weekend, but did not elaborate on the nature of the attack.

In the first quarter of last year, the company registered BRL 5.6 billion in online sales, an average of BRL 62.2 million per day.

Sought this Monday after the market closed, the company said that “it works with technical resources and experts to assess the extent of the event and safely normalize the e-commerce environment as soon as possible”. Americanas reiterated that the physical stores did not have their activities interrupted and that they remain operating.

Americanas marketplace operation accounted for 64.4% of gross sales in the first quarter of 2021.

The digital attack on one of the country’s largest e-commerce platforms followed a series of other attacks in the past year against companies in the country. The tour operator CVC, for example, was out of business for 12 days in October because of a hacker attack on its systems.

At the time, CVC reported that it was an attack with ransomware, software that encrypts a system’s information, effectively “hijacking” access to it until the victim complies with what the hacker charges to return data.