It is still not clear what exactly caused the massive point of sale computer glitch at Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX). The glitch affected Starbucks’ IT system on Friday night and continued to affect the computer system till Saturday. The glitch forced many vendors to close their stores while others offered free drinks as payments could not be received.
The crisis management experts will commend Starbucks for its handling of the situation and empowering its employees to give free drinks. The outage though must have caused the company millions in revenue.
Analysts have not yet figured out what caused the outage. It could be that Starbucks does not have a total redundancy in its system. It might also be that its backup system failed due to technical or human error or both.
The stock of the company fell 2% on Monday after a very positive response to the Q1 earnings reports.
Starbucks reported an internal failure during daily refresh of its system and dismissed external breach or cyber attacks. The outage also affected the company’s Teavana and Evolution Fresh stores. Starbucks has been using MICROS symphony for its enterprise Point of Sale software since 2011. MICROS were bought last year by tech giant Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL).
MICROS, on its Website, states that it provides self-storage to customers at one central location or one of its four worldwide data centers. It is not known whether Starbucks had its data system stored at one central location.
Online sources have suggested that the primary Point of Sale table could have been deleted which left the employees being unable to access cash registers. It is, however, difficult to imagine that critical things like Point of Sale table would not have a backup.
The glitch that disabled register at thousands of stores is a reminder of the increasingly sophisticated operations stores relies on.
