(Reuters) – Starbucks experienced a widespread systems outage in its stores in United States and Canada on Friday night, causing a number of them to give away free drinks.
Some store managers were handing out free drinks since they could not accept payment while other stores were closed entirely, a CNBC report said.
A number of social media users also reported that the computers in the stores of the world’s biggest coffee chain were down.
In a statement, Starbucks (SBUX) said: “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.”
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