Hunch. On 14 October the British Hobbs and Phase Eight websites let shoppers reach checkout, while Whistles still showed its pause notice.
The online orders market resolves on the British websites of Hobbs, Whistles and Phase Eight on 6 November 2026: YES if all three show no pause notice and let a shopper put an item in the bag and reach checkout, and NO if any brand is still paused or open only in part. BBC News and The Guardian settle it if the websites cannot be checked.
We looked for cases where a shop switched off its own sales channel after a cyber attack on its own systems, and counted the days until it took orders again. We found four such shops in Britain, the US and Japan. One had all its online sales back within 26 days, the time from 11 October to 6 November.