Woolworths supermarkets hit by IT outage

Supermarket giant Woolworths has suffered an IT outage this afternoon which affected registers at its stores nationwide.

Woolworths confirmed the outage in a social media post, saying 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," the company said.

"We apologise for the inconvenience this caused our customers."

Reports on social media showed customers being turned away or asked to abandon trolleys of groceries and leave stores during the outage.

Woolworths has not yet confirmed the exact cause of the problems.

Update 8:45am Woolworths confirmed at 8pm last night that the outage was caused by an update to their IT systems, resulting in approximately 30 minutes of downtime in a large number of their stores. It says the issue was self-corrected.