A reader wrote in today, concerned about Snap-on’s website being down for a couple of days.
Constantin wrote:
Wondering if you have any info regarding what’s happening with Snap-On. At present the shopping website has been down for 3 days, as is all of their customer service via phone. There are some very weird things being suggested on social media (e.g. the entire company, including manufacturing, has been shut down for some nefarious reason).
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I took a look, and many of Snap-on’s websites are indeed down.
Snap-on has not made any public statements about the outage.
The issue does not seem to be affecting Snap-on’s corporate pages, but it is affecting their online store and other websites.
This is what you see if you try to visit Snap-on’s online store.
I quickly reached someone when calling the phone number Snap-on has listed on their social media pages. I asked about not being able to access the website and was told that they are aware of a network outage.
I asked when it might be fixed, and they said they believe it will be fixed by tomorrow, although that’s not an official answer.
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There are rumors going around that Snap-on’s online store and related websites have been hacked. That is certainly possible, and it also possible there are issues with their network hardware or at their datacenter.
There have been increased warnings about cyberattacks on American companies, and it’s unknown as to whether Snap-on’s outages are related.
Sit tight, they’re working to fix things.
Update 3/9/2022
All of Snap-on’s websites look be fully functional again.
Jared
What a coincidence. I don’t really own any Snap-on tools, but I find myself checking them out a few times a year. Just this morning I was trying to look up their locking pliers because I read they are made by Malco, but with a higher degree of polish. Malco is already expensive, so I wondered how much Snap-on’s were worth.
When I couldn’t get anything to load, I assumed my browser was having a problem or it was because I was using a public wifi network.
Skyy
Funny, I’m in the same boat. I just checked yesterday for the first time in 3-6 months and it was down. I tried multiple devices too.
Tallen
Snapon owns malco.
Stuart
No, they don’t.
Jim
I’m having one of those night where I couldn’t stop laughing at how matter of fact this was.
Wonder where the rumor started that they owned Malco, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it come up.
Stuart
The last I talked to someone at Malco, about a year ago, they were still privately owned.
I did a bit of fact-checking before responding, just to ensure I didn’t miss any recent acquisition news, but there is zero evidence that Snap-on acquired Malco.
Malco makes Snap-on’s USA-made locking pliers now. It’s understandable that some people might misinterpret the nature of the relationship between the two brands. One person might say something in a public forum or on social media, nobody corrects them, and then the misconception is perpetuated.
Mike (the other one)
I’ve heard that some Snap-On dealers have been making this claim, and even saying that Snap-On makes the pliers for Malco, which is false.
fred
I think that Malco does source some of their products from other OEMs and in turn that Malco may be the OEM for some others.
One connection seems to be with Malco and Edma (France):
https://www.edma-tools.us/en/459-new-products
JDoe
Incorrect, we do not own Malco.
Nick
They don’t own Matco either.
Rob
$68 roughly for their locking pliers. I was told that the pliers were manufactured as part of a joint effort from Snap On and the facility in Nebraska where Vise Grips were made previously for 80+ years. I have had a set in my hands and they are extremely well made. They definitely surpassed the originals as far as strength and they are nicely polished.
Stuart
I don’t know anything about a joint effort.
I spoke at length with Malco, and they spent considerable amounts of money and effort, and went to great lengths to get the former Vise Grip facility up and running after years of closure.
Malco and Snap-on have an OEM relationship, and I highly doubt Snap-on would have invested in the factory or agreed to a large order until the first pliers rolled off the production line.
Adrien
Snap on purchased the machines that make the licking pliers from Irvin a company that makes vise grip because now their cheap shit is made is china
Stuart
No, they didn’t.
Everything was moved out of the factory in 2008, and a lot of equipment was liquidated in a spring 2009 auction. The space was rented out for 8 years as storage.
MALCO – not Snap-on – reopened the factory.
Nothing was purchased from Irwin or Vise-Grip, as everything of value was liquidated and sold off years ago.
Snap-on’s existing/other locking pliers are made by Grip-on in Spain. I don’t know about Blue-Point.
JDoe
We own the factory in Spain. It’s a Bahco factory(Snap-On owned company) and that’s where out locking as well as adjustable wrenches are made.
Stuart
@Jason
Snap-on owns Bahco, but not Grip-on.
https://www.grip-on.com/
Grip-on is the only company I know of to make epoxy-coated locking pliers in Spain.
Mike (the other one)
The only “joint effort” in place is that Malco puts the Snap-On logo on their (Malco’s) locking pliers for Snap-On to sell at a markup.
Many Snap-On products are made by other companies.
Doug
same thing with any other brand matco, mac, cornwell.. the difference is snap on is made in america not overseas.
JDoe
Made by us in Spain, what you say was the case 15 plus years ago.
JDoe
Not sure, they are made by Snap-On in our factory in Spain.
Stuart
I believe he’s talking about Eagle Grip. https://toolguyd.com/malco-eagle-grip-locking-pliers/
Also, as far as I am aware, Snap-on’s other premium locking pliers are made in Spain by Grip-on.
Anonymous
As a current worker all of our servers are down and will be down for the foreseeable future
Anonymous
How will we be able to make payments and such? Will accounts be froze?
Boris Ioffe
Perhaps cyberattack? All companies with less than perfect front-facing apps are susceptible. Welcome to the new world.
Jim Felt
I was curious so I just randomly Googled these home pages Dewalt, Hilti, Milwaukee and Bosch sites are all live.
Chris
I placed an order on March 1st. I got a reply email saying it will ship within 1 to 3 business days. However, 4 days later I checked and the site is down. My credit card shows the order still pending.
Ryan H
A cyberattack would not surprise me at all. A LOT of companies have had issues lately. One of the camera manufacturers I install had to take down their system for remote viewing, and its still not up…and they have a dedicated cyber hardening team on staff.
Because cyber actors will use other computers to launch attacks (to hide their own identity), and the invasion of Ukraine seems to be unleashing lots of cyber activity (both sanctioned and criminal), expect a lot of collateral cyber damage in the near future.
gak_pdx
According to posts on r/SnapOn, it isn’t just the websites – it is all the back-end data tools SnapOn diagnostic equipment uses to update service databases and deliver certain functions. One poster even said their 100% SnapOn diagnostics shop simply could not function starting Thursday, but I know almost nothing about Snap On’s tools in this field or how plausible that is.
My pet theory that I have no basis in, but I’m posting for posterity to see if my wild ass guess is correct – this is a cyberattack and the FBI asked Snap On not to make any public statements beyond “The network is down…” Snap On is adjacent enough to critical infrastructure and is such a well known brand that the timing would just raise tensions another notch with Russia, even if Russia wasn’t involved. An FBI gag request is also the only reason I can think of that indemnifies Snap On from the ire of the SEC – as a publicly traded company, they have a fiduciary duty to report such a catastrophic outage to shareholders quickly.
Lance
Most plausible explanation is a ransomware attack. They’re probably completely under water trying to figure out how to restore their systems. I’m surprised some of their affiliated sites are not also impacted, like techinfo(dot)toyota(dot)com. It’s definitely irritating as I have an open order for a tool I really need. Already paid and awaiting shipment, but if their systems have been encrypted, it’s anybody’s guess how long it will be before they’re able to return to normal operations.
Dale Alexander
Toyota site is not affiliated. It is Toyota’s alone.
Nathan
waiting for the snap on is based in russia rumors to start.
sucks for them hope it’s resolved quick.
Tyson R.
Snap-On dealer here for 10 years. Every single thing from our Snap-on emails, ordering line, website, app, chrome (our computer platform), all phone lines and every direct contact with anything related to Snap-on is offline. No one has said ANYTHING and whenever we reach out to higher-ups in corporate they respond with “I know just as much as you do”. They are referring to this as an “outage” but no other updates from anybody yet as of today.
West Coast
That is some real bullshit !!!
Not a word from Corporate!!!
Rio
Hi Tyson…
I am one of your virtual customer care agents. I have not received any insight just was told to be on stand by.
Thanks,
Rio
J
Still no news?
Louis
The one time I was looking at snap on stuff their website is down. At first I thought it was my maintenance school blocking the site due to us being sponsored by another tool company but turns out websites are just down
Nathan
sounds bad – wonder if they didn’t have a back up data center in another location so some power grind or other failure took it all down.
surprised for as large a company so perhaps it’s something else.
Jim Felt
Bad actor hacking knows or cares little for the feelings of any of us. As a nation* we’ve been pretty darn lucky so far into this hackable age. And yes I’m just hoping this is a random test so to speak not a precursor to a Putinesque fit of rage.
*our northerly neighbors too. A?
Maybe stash a few weeks of real live cash money for the duration? Dangitall.
NoName
All snap on systems are down including their sites around the world, no orders can be processed., there working hard to sort the issue but are finding it hard to locate the problem
rob
You remember when Facebook went down right after the whistle blower incident and rumours were abound? People figured out right away that during a standard update they managed to scrub whatever it is that serves as a yellow pages listing of their home address for their entire infrastructure. Everything was proper licked. Employees couldn’t even use their access cards.
Something minuscule can take a whole company’s computer system down and it will be insanely difficult to get it up and running as it was in a timely manner.
Snap-On’s website wasn’t exactly something to be proud of. Imagine what the rest of it looks like. I’m no computer expert, but I do remember the 80’s when one garbled blip on a cassette recording meant that your whole computer would crash.
Jim Felt
I truly hope it’s as innocent, if extremely dopey, as you suggest there. But even their dealer’s direct e-mail access? Whoa.
Bobby
Snap-on is back up know
Anonymous
I heard that there are rumors that something happened in the Germany office and they shut down globally out of an abundance of caution, but at this point there has to be something deeper going on.
Chris
Back Up
Snap-on website is back up
lobuxracer
100% for the store. Order status is current too.
JDoe
I work for Snap-On and it was a total network outage.
It was indeed a cyber attack but was caught trigger away.
The customer B2B site is back up as is the student site, complete network should be back online by tomorrow.
Mr. Man
Any clue when? I’m at corporate headquarters and the VPN is still down. We are not being told anything… Totally in the dark.
T
nope sites still seem to be down when I try them
Stuart
Which page are you trying to access? Everything seems to be working for me now.
Jeremy Hunter
For those that aren’t aware, we are referring to the snap-on credit website being down
GaryS
The shop.snapon.com now comes up and seems usable but I don’t have an account and I never receive the link to verify the email address, which is correct. I cannot place an online order. Trouble reaching the area business account rep by email, it wouldn’t say the message was received by the server until maybe 10 hrs later. I don’t know if he ever received it.
Constantin
I’ve had the same experience, except my sign-in info no longer works, and I cannot get a link to reset my password. The site’s FAQ’s do say that feature is not available at present and that new accounts cannot be set up right now, either. Emails re order status all held as undeliverable for hours.
d
Snapon.com email system is still down.
Rolls Cnardly
Make No Mistake, this was no hard drive or Hardware failure. Goes waay deeper than that. Although the Money Making sites are all back up, some of the business critical sites still have not been restored. This was an attack, and a successful one at that.
Justin Kase
Snapon is a major defense contractor… their Level 5 automated tool control boxes is used at many, many military units. I’m mentioning this because they got hacked and hit with ransomware on their entire network. From the corporation to the franchise guys with trucks. It all went down and was held ransom… Here’s the kick: they’re trying keep it quiet.
Constantin
Whatever happened, they’re not in any hurry to publicize it. I’ve seen claims they’ve been deleting Twitter & Facebook replies / comments mentioning the issue, though some such comments still are visible, casting at least some doubt on that allegation.
I’d also note that since the site went back up, all three items in my pending order (all inexpensive, order placed in late February) have increased in price.
SnaponBuyer
I deleted one of my tweets after realizing some spammer recognized the word “hacked” and auto responded to my tweet within seconds telling people to go to some other website. I deleted my tweet as it also removed that scam/spam auto reply, but I am not sure about other posts getting deleted for asking about it.
I too am having issues with Snapon, I have a large amount on order but when I call in the only thing they can do is give me pricing. I can’t place new orders or look up existing orders, and they don’t know if I will need to resend my emails or not yet.
Mr. Man
How did you find out it was ransomware?
Bob
Still No internet/VPN …driving at these gas prices to the office to read a book because nothing works. As of 3/10 limited internal databases but no email,internet or new work since the crash 3/3/22pm. 9 days, and counting, is a long time to be down and no major news story to find about it.
Steve
Same here. Limited connectivity in the office, still no e-mail, no VPN. Some of the applications work now but most are down.
Rolls Cnardly
E-mail will be the last thing restored, as it makes the company zero dollars. VPN should be restored first, as the lack of that is causing business operations to cease, which means eventual lost profits, and THAT is never acceptable !
BES
shop.snapon.com is not accepting new accounts. Verification link is never sent. As such, cannot make any purchases. Attempted to email two different snap-on resellers in the Houston Texas area.. using their snapon.com email addresses… both emails bounced. Nothing is working. It gives all appearance that snapon may be ceasing all operations. What a shame.
west
Snappy is coming back online , it’s just painfully slow to get restored and we Know nothing even from day to day !!
GaryS
On 3/14, the account email verification worked, I placed an order, it said 3 days for standard ups shipping, I received the items today 3/16 (in Wisconsin)! I was also waiting for an email back from the business rep, received it just after I placed the order. I just about completely gave up, but it looks like they probably have things working again.
SnaponBuyer
Yeah they seem to be back now, my orders have been processing.
Now I’m hearing Apex Tool Group was hacked and their website & systems are down.