(Bloomberg) -- A massive IT failure that has grounded flights and upended markets has also ruined a morning ritual for many: their coffee orders.
Starbucks Corp.’s online system to order ahead on mobile apps appeared to be down on Friday morning, forcing workers to take orders by hand.
In downtown Boston, workers said orders from the app aren’t printing labels they use to fill orders. Staff can see the orders, but without the tickets, their work flow was disrupted. In-person orders were still working as normal.
Similar issues were occurring in New York City, where workers also complained of not receiving the labels that normally come through from the app. A worker at a location in Midtown East in Manhattan, who asked not to be named, said that they were busier than usual because they have to write orders down by hand.
At an Upper East Side location, staff also said it was only foot traffic this morning. At a separate Midtown East location, a worker described the process as going back to the old ways.
Starbucks workers went on social networks to express their frustrations. On X, the company told customers that it’s looking into problems and “working hard to make sure all is up and running quickly as possible.”
In an email, Starbucks said it has experienced “a temporary outage of our mobile order ahead and pay features.” The company continues to serve customers in the “vast majority” of its locations and is working to bring systems online as quickly as possible.
Joe Colangelo, the chief executive officer of Boxcar, which runs a luxury bus service for people in New Jersey who commute into Manhattan, estimated he saw about 100 drinks with hand written labels piled up on the Starbucks counter when he arrived at a Cranford, New Jersey, location. He went to grab a vanilla latte for his wife, and while the mobile order went through, baristas weren’t receiving those orders and had to process them all manually. The workers asked customers to line up and visually present their orders at the register, which the baristas then hollered to their colleagues and processed by hand.
“We had to wait about 10 extra minutes, but the workers were really hustling,” Colangelo said.
--With assistance from Brooke Sutherland and Shelly Banjo.
(Updates with company response in the seventh paragraph.)
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