
Point of Sale Register Outage at Starbucks Stores in U.S. and Canada  - dalerus
https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-point-of-sale-register-outage-resolved
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dendory
This image has been circulating as the cause of the outage. Can't confirm
either way: [http://i.imgur.com/zoX08TY.png](http://i.imgur.com/zoX08TY.png)

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MichaelGG
"The main POS table was deleted"

If true, perhaps someone learned the value of _BEGIN TRANSACTION_ today.

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

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potatosareok
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.

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late2part
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.

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colinbartlett
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.

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JoeAltmaier
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!

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thesimon
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.

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radruler
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.

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mg1982
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).

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fr0styMatt2
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....

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empressplay
...and it's gone.

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ddingus
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)

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keithpeter
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.

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technophiliac
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."

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

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matthewarkin
I think Starbucks and Square have dropped their partnership:
[http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/12/22/starbucks-drops-
squar...](http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/12/22/starbucks-drops-square-app-
as-mobile-payments-battle-intensifies/)

~~~
wmf
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."

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minaguib
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.

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jlgaddis
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.

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

[https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-point-of-sale-
regi...](https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-point-of-sale-register-
outage-resolved)

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dang
Thanks. Url changed to that from [https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-
stores-register-ou...](https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-stores-
register-outage).

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wiggumz
Starwho?

