Starbucks is back in business after a major glitch last week. Thousands of stores in the U.S. and Canada were affected by the computer glitch, which gave away free beverages.
The glitch caused the registers to malfunction, making them unable to process transactions and payments. Baristas had to give away free coffee because of the outage, which customers gladly accepted. Some stores prevented drive-thru customers by blocking the entrance.
The announcement that Starbucks stores will close early followed.
"All Starbucks stores in the US and Canada are expected to open for business as usual on Saturday. We apologize to our customers for this inconvenience," Starbucks said in an official statement.
According to reports, the glitch, which affected 7,000 registers in the U.S. and 1,000 in Canada, was resolved Friday night. The company said that it was brought about by "a failure during a daily system refresh."
Starbucks spokesman Jim Olson explained that there was no external breach that occurred, and that the outage was completely an internal failure.
An internal incident report posted on Reddit, however, blamed a "deleted database table" for the outage. According to a Reddit user, who calls himself "corporate partner," Starbucks' "main POS table was deleted." This disabled stores from processing transactions and even logging in the system. The post was deleted later on, according to sources.
Some pointed out that Starbucks still uses an old school point-of-sale (POS) system, Simphony, and a PC to process transactions.
"I would suggest against old school POS systems, which contains more than you will ever need, and doesn't help you at all to be on top of your business," a netizen shared.
Starbucks has a good reputation in terms of customer service, and the recent outage was an example of the company showing "grace under pressure."
Last year, a customer whose card was declined at a Starbucks counter shared her story on Reddit. The drive-thru lady, according to the customer, swiped her card twice, only to be declined twice. The barista, sensing the customer's embarrassment, gave her four drinks free of charge. Now that's going the extra mile.
