Starbucks Computer System Outage Fixed, Stores Expected To Reopen On Saturday

A major outage of Starbucks’ computer systems, which led to the coffee chain giving away free coffee at locations across the U.S. and Canada on Friday, was resolved after several hours, the company announced on its website late Friday. The stores are now set to reopen on Saturday.

According to an earlier company statement, Starbucks' cash registers, or point-of-sale systems, at its stores went down during a daily update. The company said that the system failure affected 7,000 company-operated stores in the U.S. and 1,000 stores in Canada, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

“The point of sale register outage has been resolved and all Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada are expected to open for business as usual on Saturday, April 25,” Starbucks said in a statement. “We apologize to our customers for this inconvenience. Evolution Fresh and Teavana Tea Bar stores are also expected to open as scheduled on Saturday.”

The outage reportedly affected the West Coast late Friday afternoon and the East Coast early evening. Starbucks said the stores that had not already shut for the day were closed early. However, the company did not say exactly what caused the system glitch.

There is no storewide policy at Starbucks, which would dictate its stores how to respond to the failure of point-of-sale systems. On Friday, customers found that some stores had closed while others offered free brewed coffee or tea, the AP reported, adding that the problem did not affect about 5,000 licensed stores in the U.S. and about 300 licensed stores in Canada.