Coles site crashes after 80% alcohol discount goes viral on Reddit

On Friday afternoon, an Australian price-tracking website operator posted something on Reddit that would bring down Coles' entire digital operation within hours. The post was simple: a screenshot showing 24-packs of Jack Daniel's & Cola selling for $27 instead of $130. That's a $103 saving. That's 80% off. "Found this. I'm assuming it's a mistake?!" the post read.

It wasn't a mistake anyone was going to ignore. The Reddit thread exploded. By Saturday morning, it had accumulated more than 180,000 views. Other users began reporting similar pricing anomalies across the alcohol section—premixed drinks and beer cases marked down to prices that made no commercial sense, as if the system had somehow confused 24-packs with 4-packs and applied discount rates accordingly. People started ordering. Some reported successfully purchasing cases at these prices. One customer even got a local Liquorland store to match the online discount in person.

Coles' website and app went dark on Saturday morning. For several hours, both displayed the same holding message: "we're currently offline – but not for long." The systems came back briefly in the afternoon, but by then the beer and premixed drinks categories had vanished from the site entirely. Then the whole thing went down again. By 3:30 p.m., the website was still offline.

The company's response came in a Saturday afternoon statement. A Coles spokesperson acknowledged what had happened: a technical error had caused select 24-pack beer and ready-to-drink products to be priced incorrectly across the website. The error, they said, had been corrected. Customers who had already placed orders would be notified. Anyone charged would receive a refund. The company apologized for the inconvenience.

But the question of how such an error occurred in the first place pointed toward something larger. The operators of CW Scanner, the price-tracking site that had first flagged the anomaly, suspected artificial intelligence. "If the AI was deeply integrated into the system it might explain why they had to take the entire site offline," a representative told The Guardian. "It seems to be something like a wildcard term was used to search for all 4-packs which found 24-packs as well." In other words, an automated system designed to manage pricing may have misfired in a way that required human intervention to contain—and that containment meant shutting down the entire platform.

The scale of the error was substantial. CW Scanner identified at least 20 different 24-packs of beer and 46 cases of premixed drinks affected by the discounts. The average markdown on beer was around $49 per case. On premixed drinks, it was $111. The single largest discount applied to 24-packs of Smirnoff Crush Mango & Peach Zero Sugar cans, which dropped from $202 to $29—a $173 saving.

This incident arrives in a particular context for Coles. Earlier in 2026, a court found that the company's "Down Down" promotional campaigns had in some cases deliberately misled customers about the true depth of price reductions. The pricing error on Saturday, whether caused by human mistake or algorithmic failure, raises uncomfortable questions about how much visibility the company actually has into its own pricing systems—and whether the increasing automation of retail operations creates new vulnerabilities that are difficult to detect until they've already gone viral.