Some Starbucks are suffering from a payment outage and giving out free coffee

This morning the TechCrunch staff woke up at our Disrupt NY hotel to find out that the Starbucks in the lobby couldn’t accept any payments — meaning they couldn’t give us coffee.

A quick Twitter check showed that we weren’t the only ones — people around the country were complaining that their local Starbucks’ payment system was down this morning.

The Starbucks pos systems are down… most of them are starting to shut down entirely.

— Holly (@HMounsteven) May 16, 2017

We reached out to Starbucks, and they said that payment systems at some stores in the U.S. and Canada are offline after an issue with an overnight technology update to their POS systems.

While some assumed the outage was related to last weekend’s global ransomware attack, or a separate hack, Starbucks confirmed to us that their systems were never compromised and the outage is solely related to an issue with the system update.

While systems are coming back online, as of now some locations are still unable to accept payment. Starbucks simply said that these locations are “prepared to take care of our customers,” which seems to mean that at least some locations are giving out free drinks.

The system @ Starbucks on north Ave is down so they're giving away free drinks , rt to save a life 🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗🤗

— Michelle (@micheladaa98) May 16, 2017

It’s definitely nice of Starbucks to keep people caffeinated during the outage, and hopefully people won’t take advantage of this and overdo it on the free coffee.

Full statement from Starbucks below:

As part of our normal course of business, overnight we worked to install a technology update to our store registers in the U.S. and Canada. A limited number of locations remain offline, and we are working swiftly to resume full operations in each of these stores. The stores will remain open during this time and, as always, our partners are prepared to take care of our customers to ensure they have the best experience possible. – Starbucks