Asda has apologised after thousands of customers ordering from its George clothing range were left out of pocket ahead of the new school year due to a botched IT update.

Swatches of shoppers reported that money had been taken out of accounts, but orders were not sent, while others said they were unable to return items purchased online, The Telegraph reported.

However, an Asda spokesman confirmed that all orders have now been fulfilled and that there are no current issues as the supermarket had its strongest ever start to the back to school season.

Asda upgraded George’s online system earlier this month as part of its £800m IT project to separate the grocery chain’s systems from former owner Walmart.

Asda said it was working to resolve the IT problems at George as quickly as possible.

The spokesman said: “As part of building a bigger and better Asda, we are delivering Europe’s largest IT transformation, involving the separation and upgrade of over 2,500 systems from Walmart.

“Earlier this month, as part of this process we migrated 9.6m historic George orders onto our new George.com platform. The overwhelming majority of these were completed successfully and the platform is trading well.

“However, we are aware of a number of issues with some historic customer orders. We sincerely apologise for this and any inconvenience caused and are working hard to resolve them as quickly as possible.”

Earlier this year, it was revealed that nearly 10,000 Asda workers had received incorrect payslips following the company’s recent HR system upgrade.

The supermarket’s chair Lord Rose told The Telegraph earlier this month that Project Future was “mission critical” to its turnaround plan, but admitted “there have been some glitches along the way”.

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