A nationwide outage of Starbucks' point-of-sale system got some customers a free jolt of espresso.
The coffee chain confirmed the outage to store staff around 7:30 p.m. ET on Friday via a tweet on the company's Twitter account for employees. Starbucks later said in a statement, "the outage was caused by a failure during a daily system refresh."
"We are aware of the point of sale register outage at company-operated Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada," the company said in the statement. "We are actively working to resolve the outage and our stores will remain open and continue to serve our customers."
We're sorry about the POS issue and working as fast as we can to fix it. What a week! — Starbucks Partners (@starbucksprtnrs) April 24, 2015
News of the outage lit up social networks as some stores offered customers free drinks of their choosing.
FREE STARBUCKS | SYSTEMS ARE DOWN pic.twitter.com/UCMXIukqMr — Preston Hall (@Prestonxhall) April 24, 2015
U.S. & World
If you're downtown come to the Starbucks at 10th & chestnut. Their registers are down so everything is free until they're back up. — IG: aaronricketts_ (@aaronricketts_) April 24, 2015
But not all locations were being as generous, customers shared.
Baristas now telling me that "corporate" has ordered stores to only accept cash. No more "complimentary" drinks. — Anthony Quintano (@AnthonyQuintano) April 25, 2015
Starbucks said in the statement the outage was also affecting their Evolution Fresh and Teavana stores.
UPDATE: Starbucks said it had resolved the outage in all U.S. and Canadian stores, according to press release posted on their website early Saturday morning. The company apologized to customers for the inconvenience and said it expected to open for business as usual on Saturday, April 25.
