This image has been circulating as the cause of the outage. Can't confirm either way: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/zoX08TY.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/zoX08TY.png</a>
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.<p>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.
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 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."
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).<p>I don't see why the PoS's can't accumulate transaction logs locally and transfer them later.
They fixed the issue. Removed link and posted new post.<p><a href="https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-point-of-sale-register-outage-resolved" rel="nofollow">https://news.starbucks.com/news/starbucks-point-of-sale-regi...</a>