Starbucks payment system outage in US, Canada resolved

[BENGALURU] Starbucks Corp said on Friday night that an outage affecting payment systems at a number of its stores in the United States and Canada had been resolved.

The outage was caused by a failure during a daily system refresh, the world's biggest coffee chain said in a statement on its website on Friday. "The point of sale register outage has been resolved and all Starbucks stores in the US and Canada are expected to open for business as usual on Saturday," a statement on the company's website said.

"We apologise to our customers for this inconvenience." Starbucks said the outage also affected its Evolution Fresh and Teavana stores, which the company said would also open as scheduled on Saturday.

The company said some of its stores had closed early due to the malfunction.

CNBC reported that some store managers were handing out free drinks since they could not accept payment, while other stores were closed entirely.

A number of social media users also reported that the computers in the stores of the Seattle-based company were down.

On Thursday, the company said sales at shops open at least 13 months were up 7 per cent in the Americas region for the second quarter ended March 29.

REUTERS