Starbucks signIt’s free coffee Friday at Starbucks, apparently.

The coffee giant suffered computer problems on Friday afternoon just after 4 p.m. PST that shut down its point-of-sale systems across the nation and forced the company to give away free coffee and tea.

[Follow up: Starbucks lost millions in sales because of a ‘system refresh’ computer problem]

At the Starbucks near our office, baristas said they thought it was a local network issue. However, it seems that the problem is affecting stores nationwide and even in Canada.

While this is certainly causing havoc for Starbucks, it’s safe to say that customers are rather happy about the problem:

https://twitter.com/Nollexxzonee/status/591747151132119040

And yes, someone even Periscope’d the scene from Nevada:

Stores in Canada also had issues:

We’ve reached out to Starbucks and will update when we learn more about the computer outage.

Thankfully, Starbucks has plenty of financial cushion to absorb the free drinks. The company posted record quarterly earnings on Thursday with net revenues of $4.6 billion.

Update (5:45 p.m.): Starbucks has acknowledged the outage in a statement, saying that it was caused by a “daily system refresh,” and says that the issue also affects Evolution Fresh and Teavana locations.

We are aware of the point of sale register outage at company-operated Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada.   We are actively working to resolve the outage and our stores will remain open and continue to serve our customers.  The outage was caused by a failure during a daily system refresh.  We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience or confusion and will update this statement once systems are back online.  This outage also effects our Evolution Fresh and Teavana stores.

Update (7:10 p.m.): Starbucks changed their statement from noting that “our stores will remain open” to “our stores that have not already closed for the evening are closing early.”

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