A widespread system outage hit Starbucks locations across Canada and the U.S. Friday night, prompting some stores to give away free coffee and drinks, according to a flood of social media posts.
Starbucks confirmed the outage in a statement on its website and said it’s “actively working” to solve the problem.
Company spokesman Jim Olson said the computer glitch disrupted sales at 1,000 stores in Canada and 7,000 in the United States.
Starbucks also said late Friday that its stores that had not already closed for the evening would be closing early.
“The outage was caused by a failure during a daily system refresh,” the company said. “We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience or confusion and will update this statement once systems are back online.”
The outage was dubbed #thefrappening on Twitter, with many happy customers tweeting about receiving free coffee, lattes and other beverages.
Just got some free @Starbucks coffee because the #starbucksdown POS system is down
— Mike (@iTweetMike) April 25, 2015
#TheFrappening is here. Free #Starbucks for all
— Karm Sumal (@KarmSumal) April 25, 2015
FREE DRINKS AT STARBUCKS BC SYSTEM IS SHUTTING DOWN ????? GOTTA VENTI !!!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/K1dWzVAdc4
— janessa (@janessatadina) April 24, 2015
Others were disappointed to find their neighbourhood Starbucks closed.
What?!! My Starbucks was lame and gave away no free stuff. They closed!
— Brittany (@BrittBrownMarsh) April 25, 2015
With files from The Associated Press
