Starbucks locations reportedly experienced a major, widespread outage on their payment systems on Friday night.
CNBC reports that, due to the system outage, many Starbucks locations throughout the United States and Canada had to give away free drinks to their customers.
YOU GUYS THE STARBUCKS SYSTEM WENT DOWN WORLDWIDE AND WE’VE BEEN GIVING AWAY FREE DRINKS FOR AN HOUR THIS IS AMAZING
— Hayley (@hayleylis) April 25, 2015
Starbucks is giving out free drinks right now because their system is down. you’re welcome
— S. Fern (@sfernns) April 25, 2015
Other locations throughout the country apparently decided to shut down their stores completely, leaving signage on their doors and/or windows to notify customers of their temporary closings.
According to an official statement published on the company’s official website , point-of-sale (POS) systems that are being used in company-operated locations went down during a daily update and have not yet recovered.
“We are aware of the point of sale register outage at company-operated Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada. We are actively working to resolve the outage and our stores will remain open and continue to serve our customers. The outage was caused by a failure during a daily system refresh. We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience or confusion and will update this statement once systems are back online. This outage also affects our Evolution Fresh and Teavana stores.”
It did not take very long for many of the Starbucks customers (and even some employees) to talk about the systems outage on Twitter.
Some people even used their tweets to advertise the exact locations in the area that were experiencing the outage and offering free beverages because of it.
FREE drinks at @Starbucks – at least until they fix cash registers around the world. @KING5Seattle I’m at Starbucks HQ coffee shop
— Dan Cassuto (@DanCassuto) April 25, 2015
FREE DRINKS AT STARBUCKS FOR ALL OF SAN ANTONIO THEIR SYSTEMS ARE DOWN AND ITS ALL FREE ONE PER PERSON ANY SIZE pic.twitter.com/5AfNdmO4GD
— Emmazing (@nothisisemma) April 25, 2015
On the other hand, many people have tweeted their complaints about the unexpected closings of the Starbucks locations in their area.
when you walk 45 minutes in the rain to Starbucks for it only to be closed >>>
— jada shepherd (@jadaashepherd) April 25, 2015
Starbucks would be closed the day I go
— Emily Garcia (@emilygarciaa1) April 25, 2015
All Starbucks nation wide are closed right now and I’m standing outside sad
— Hayley? (@HayleyReinarz) April 25, 2015
As of right now, there is still no official report stating the cause of the Starbucks system outage or an estimated time when the systems are expected to be up and running again.
[Image Credit: New York Post ]