Point of Sale Register Outage at Starbucks Stores in U.S. and Canada | Hacker News Reader

Point of Sale Register Outage at Starbucks Stores in U.S. and Canada

news.starbucks.com

26 pointsdalerus30 comments

This image has been circulating as the cause of the outage. Can't confirm either way: http://i.imgur.com/zoX08TY.png

"The main POS table was deleted"

If true, perhaps someone learned the value of BEGIN TRANSACTION today.

Yes, their "IT support" (that costs how much per year again), run by some underpaid "SQL Specialist" in India with 9 layers of Middle-management above probably fumbled an SQL query.

Note: This is a critique of "corporate IT services" essentially, overpriced and underperforming

lol

Or, if they were using MySQL, what they may have learned today is that DDL statements (such as DROP TABLE) implicitly COMMIT.

While I did learn something new from your comment, I can't imagine any enterprise shop that's not running Oracle DB or MSSQL. Maybe it's just the bias I have from my job history, but for standard enterprise shops and their OLTP data, is there any competitor to Oracle DB & MSSQL? I know that at my employer they use berekleydb/teradata/hadoop/mainframe systems for different workloads, but the bread and butter is Oracle RAC clusters.

Not saying that I think Oracle DB & MSSQL is unbeatable, I'm asking because I am trying to see what exists outside my little biased view.

Change management is hard. It's amazing all these complicated systems work half as good as they do. Kudos to these guys for fixing it fast.

When I was living in Argentina briefly, the PoS system at Starbucks once went down. And operations were continuing surprisingly well. They appeared to have planned for it, and had 2-part forms they were writing out by hand for every order.

Aside from the fact that the baristas had to turn around and look at the price board to know what to write down, and the line was a bit longer because of this, it all still worked.

I guess I'm not surprised that Starbucks would plan for that. When the power goes out, what do people do? Stream into the street from their offices, and go down to Starbucks for a cup of coffee. That's a great opportunity for them, and they'd be silly not to have a plan for that situation!

At least from what I've read at /r/Starbucks, the only plan is to comp the drinks. Increases customer happiness, but not the financials.

No espresso, blended drinks, etc if the power goes out

Similar story: I worked at one of their flagship stores in college and our systems were down for about an hour. We made due with writing everything down on receipt paper and logging it later, and had surprisingly few complaints/comps. Say what you will about snooty baristas, but the managers seemed very well-equipped to handle disasters like that.

POS behavior matches the incident ticket image below - it appeared as if they intentionally disabled user authentication for the micros simphony point of sale client. Client loaded fine but would timeout attempting to authenticate user logins in the POS. Would have tested the local test accounts but forgot the credentials at the time.

I read that three times as register outRage and couldn't figure out what the article was on about. Register outrage,on the other hand, I would totally get (and is totally overdue a front page HN story).

I can go one better. I also read it as register 'outrage', then read your comment and misread 'outage' as 'outrage' in THAT and then thought you must have mistaken the question for a programming question because of misreading it as 'outRage' camel-cased and that's what confused you.

Moral of the story: I'm still really tired after an 8-hour overnight flight. I don't have the "fall asleep while sitting up" capability!

Thankfully no mission-critical code got written today.... I think....

...and it's gone.

Seems like the IBM system. Impacted the registers.

So we just put some bucks in the tip jar, and they kept on making coffee.

No real worries at one PDX Starbucks. (thanks guys)

Good for them.

In the UK, when Oculus goes down, no coffee (staff tend to be younger people and perhaps not confident to set up a tip jar and ring the money in later).

A lot of Starbucks and other coffee outlets are franchise operations over here so it isn't actually run by starbucks and the counter may not run all the services. I wanted to have a meeting in a franchised outlet once and foolishly assumed that it would be possible to just run a check. It wasn't, but the lady simply got a box, I put £40 in and she rang each person's order through and put the change back in the box.

Initiative. People need to be allowed to show it when the system goes down.

I know where to go the next time this happens. The Starbucks at 17th and Bristol in Santa Ana, CA still took your order, as if everything were normal. Cashier punches in the order so the barista can work on it but instead of telling you how much you need to pay, cashier tells you "our system is down, this one's on us."

Doesn't Square power all of starbucks payments these days? Was this a Square starbucks outage?

I was wondering this too. I'm curious if starbucks will release any additional details other than, we've fixed it.

I'd say it was probably IBM's system as they are prone to being glitchy, at least the Starbucks POSs, this is based on experience. But who knows if they will release the details.

I think Starbucks and Square have dropped their partnership: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/12/22/starbucks-drops-squar...

From that article: "Square and Starbucks are not totally splitting up. Square said it still processes debit and credit card payments at 7,000 of the coffee chain’s U.S. stores."

Some Starbucks stores use Micros; others use IBM hardware and Agilysys software.

Nothing to do with Square.

Getting a cup of coffee from your local café should not require its point of sale to require communication with a central server (unless you're doing money/account balance transactions).

I don't see why the PoS's can't accumulate transaction logs locally and transfer them later.

How many Starbucks customers pay with cash? Any transaction involving a debit/credit card, a gift card, or the iPhone app is going to require communicating with a system outside of the store.

They fixed the issue. Removed link and posted new post.

https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-point-of-sale-regi...

Thanks. Url changed to that from https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-stores-register-ou....

Starwho?

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