Good news, Starbucks fans: The coffee giant’s stores are open again. Bad news: The coffee isn’t free anymore.
The Seattle-based coffee company says it has resolved a point-of-sale computer outage that struck stores in the U.S. and Canada on Friday afternoon and evening. The outage made big news as baristas around the country, unable to ring up transactions, started giving away coffee at no charge, before the company announced that it would be closing stores early.
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Starbucks said in an updated statement this morning, “The point of sale register outage has been resolved and all Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada are opening for business today as usual. Our Evolution Fresh and Teavana Tea Bar stores are also opening as scheduled. As previously stated, the outage was caused by an internal failure during a daily system refresh and was not the result of an external breach. We apologize to our customers for this inconvenience.”
The company’s point-of-sale system runs on MICROS Simphony. An apparent internal Starbucks incident report — posted on Reddit by a person identified as a “corporate partner” — said “the main POS table was deleted,” preventing any stores from logging in and ringing transactions.
The incident report, which has since been deleted from Reddit, described the impacted region as “Global,” including North America and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
Starbucks has publicly characterized the incident as a North American problem. Because of the time difference, problems at closed stores overseas would not have been as obvious, but as further evidence, a Redditor who works at a 24-hour Starbucks in the UK says systems went down there, and describes the problem as global. We’ve asked Starbucks to clarify the geographic scope of the problem.
