Target Experiences A 'Massive' Nationwide Cash Register Outage (cbsnews.com) 110
CBS News reports:
Target acknowledged nationwide "system issues" affecting its stores on Saturday that prevented its customers from checking out at registers. The outage caused long checkout lines at Target locations, with upset customers posting images and video on social media.
Slashdot reader McGruber shared an article reporting more than 5,000 posts on Downdetector.com about problems at Target stores Saturday -- and noting that Target is America's eighth-largest retailer. (CBS reports Target has 1,800 stores scattered across the country.) "This is how you bring America to a standstill," a Minnesota news producer joked on Twitter (where the phrase #targetdown is now trending...)
"At least Target kept me fed," the news producer added later. "They brought out candy and popcorn and wings. I'm thinking they should set up a TV next and pop in a movie. Maybe we can play bean bag toss, too..."
Slashdot reader McGruber shared an article reporting more than 5,000 posts on Downdetector.com about problems at Target stores Saturday -- and noting that Target is America's eighth-largest retailer. (CBS reports Target has 1,800 stores scattered across the country.) "This is how you bring America to a standstill," a Minnesota news producer joked on Twitter (where the phrase #targetdown is now trending...)
"At least Target kept me fed," the news producer added later. "They brought out candy and popcorn and wings. I'm thinking they should set up a TV next and pop in a movie. Maybe we can play bean bag toss, too..."
why are people waiting in line? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this like the old USSR or Venezuela? Leave your crap and go to another store that works
Re: why are people waiting in line? (Score:1)
Candy? Popcorn? Wings? Maybe a nice upright with the hot girl in the corduroy pants?
Re: (Score:1)
Let me guess the barber would charge very substantially extra to dye your hair purple.
Re:why are people waiting in line? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this like the old USSR or Venezuela? Leave your crap and go to another store that works
Assuming you have no information no the outage or when it will be resolved, the things that go through people's heads while they queue:
1) It may be back up and running in a second and everything is good.
2) I've been here 10 minutes already, I'll be supremely pissed if I leave now and in 2 minutes we're good again.
3) I wonder if just Target is affected. What if the next store has the same problem.
4) To get to the next store is 30 minutes of my time. If this is fixed in the next 29 minutes my queuing would have been worth it.
5) Why do people online question us, what is wrong in their life to make them so impatient? Can't they just chill?
The 5th one I just added to the list, people probably don't actually have that running through their heads while queuing.
Re:Thatâ(TM)s funny (Score:5, Informative)
Also worth mentioning that the card machines were fine, it was a connection issue to their central inventory system that went down. They could scan an item, it would read the code and know what it was and how much it was, but the register wasn't able to update the inventory system.
Re: (Score:1)
Microsoft's SQL server no doubt. Why are these system disasters always Microsoft?
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft's SQL server no doubt. Why are these system disasters always Microsoft?
Scumbag criminal enterprise Microsoft sending out its astroturfing trolls to social networking sites again.
Let me guess (Score:2)
They've recently gone all-in on the Cloud?
Outage - check back later. (Score:2)
A 'Massive' Nationwide Cash Register Outage
They're expecting a fresh shipment of cash registers by the end of the week.
Inconvenienced shoppers will get a coupon for 20% off their next cash register.
[Also, "massive" and "nationwide" -- really.]
Re:Outage - check back later. (Score:5, Funny)
[Also, "massive" and "nationwide" -- really.]
Well, to be fair it could've been an outage of all their stores in Luxembourg - which would not require a particularly massive outage.
Re: (Score:2)
If target really had cared last time, they would have cracked down hard after the last cracking. Instead, they off-shored a great deal more to India.
Windows (Score:2)
Wonder if their back end runs Windows?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Certificate related outages (Score:4, Insightful)
Wish I had mod points, assuming they still exist.
Certificate expiration do cause a surprising number of outages :-(
Re: (Score:1)
My company's 10th anniversary bash was basically happy hour coupled with an IT workshop on reinstalling the company cert.
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Even if that, this is plain old gross incompetence.
Re: (Score:2)
Now Russian operatives are taking out Target?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Not sure about that, but I remember back in 2012 I was at target and swiped my credit card (which encodes the name in UTF-8 and uses umlauts), which caused every single cash register in the store to shut down when swiped. As it were only few customers in the store at the time, the manager tested if it could be replicated and it could.
They don't have the best system, whatever it is...
Re: Windows (Score:1)
What you observed is something I absolutely *hate* about Target: they log your card details into their own system. Pay attention next time you shop: the card transaction is processed by the hand held POS terminal. But in addition, they take your card and swipe it through their own reader, effectively logging your purchase to a unique identifier (your card number) and allowing them to track your purchases.
This is also how the data breach was able to get card data, since technically such information is suppos
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder why you think it matters. Do you routinely scapegoat a vendor you don't like rather than analysing determining and fixing the actual root cause of a problem?
2013 POS (Score:3)
UPDATE: It's fixed (Score:2)
I went to the local store ... (Score:2)
... and verified that "some things scan, but a lot don't. Just pick up what you need and we'll try to scan it."
There were many carts full of rejected items.
Then, I went to target.com and a pop-over said, "Showing items available."
Looks like the backend has problems.
Re: (Score:2)
Wife went to Target today and lines all took forever, then as she got to be second in line the lady in front of her screamed
"F** This!! I'm not doing that You need to get your s*** together!"
It turned out they somehow required each item to be checked out as a separate transaction, paid for individually. My wife had 5 things and went ahead and dealt with it due to sunk time, but the lady in front of her had a few dozen
I guess it's hitting each store differently?
Re: (Score:1)
I'd guess the backend purchase logger database was too slow or otherwise overwhelmed.
That's something I really don't get. I have been administering and sometimes extending three different Point of Sale systems for decades. They are pretty cheap and not really good. But none of them talk directly do the backend database. They do all the work to a local database, and then that gets synchronized to the backend, either directly when the cash register is online again. In the last couple of years there have been *some* things, like online coupon verification etc.. that talk directly to the backen
not surprised (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
How many more times are you going to blast this in the comment section? Were you a Target developer who got laid off and wants attention? So far this is the third post I've come across. Go outside and cool down.
Re: (Score:2)
shithead, India's business with USA is over ten times the volume.
USA and Russia both sell arms to India.
You have no point
Re: not surprised (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
and India's #2 supplier is good ol' USA, billions of dollars a year in weapons. What's the problem? the weapons they are buying from Russia are to be used along the Chinese border, they aren't a threat to USA.
Re: (Score:2)
INDIA is not a threat to the west. I've never said that.
Look, I do not know what nation you are from. But assume you are from America and work with the UK for the last 10-20 years. You have loads of friends there. Now, you go to work in a company in Argentina that will pay you 1/10 of what the regular Argentinian makes. You are not working with any of the Argentinians directly, just Americans. In addition, the compan
Re: (Score:2)
what I posted is absolutely accurate, your wikipedia article is irrelevant and your conclusions wrong.
India has purchased more than $15 billion in arms in past year from USA
https://carnegieendowment.org/... [carnegieendowment.org]
India plants to buy $150 billlion more in next 10 to 15 years
Those are the facts. You spew nonsense.
Re: not surprised (Score:2)
Why post if you are so clueless WindBourne? (Score:2)
it is doubtful that America will every be more than small seller to them.
Yet
Try some [wikiwow.in] facts instead [indiatimes.com]
The largest arms suppliers to India from 2013-2017 were Russia (62%), US (15%) and Israel (11%).
The US, as part of its foreign policy to counter China’s growing influence in Asia has notched up military sales to India — worth $15 billion over the last decade and up by 557% between 2008-2012 and 2013-2017 — to overtake several countries and displace Russia at the top spot for a couple of years.
A small seller that just happens to be in the top spot some years...standard WindBourne logic/lies/idiocy.
Why do you always lie WindBourne? (Score:2)
And why do you always link to sites that don't even say what you claim they say?
Try some [wikiwow.in] facts instead [indiatimes.com]
The largest arms suppliers to India from 2013-2017 were Russia (62%), US (15%) and Israel (11%).
The US, as part of its foreign policy to counter China’s growing influence in Asia has notched up military sales to India — worth $15 billion over the last decade and up by 557% between 2008-2012 and 2013-2017 — to overtake several countries and displace Russia at the top spot for a couple of years.
Target's Registers Their Achille's Heel (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to have fun at Target, go pickup 50 Hot Wheels or some other small items and have the cashier key scan one and key in quantity 50. The cash register will freeze for about 3-4 minutes as the receipt is generated. The Target cash register system is old and archaic and the investment required to update them would probably bankrupt the company.
Re: (Score:3)
I thought their head office was their Achille's heel. The company that thought that opening around 140 stores across Canada at the same time as implementing their distribution system just so that they could make a big splash. And they changed the format of the stores to low (lower? I've never been there) end crap instead of sticking with the stuff that's in the US stores that drove Canadians to the US to shop there. Then they wonder why it failed.
I swear, if you tap any of the executives on the top of the h
Re: (Score:2)
If you want to have fun at Target, go pickup 50 Hot Wheels or some other small items and have the cashier key scan one and key in quantity 50. The cash register will freeze for about 3-4 minutes as the receipt is generated. The Target cash register system is old and archaic and the investment required to update them would probably bankrupt the company.
Most POS (Point Of Sale) systems are antiquated POS's. Some are modern and shiny POS's but these perform worse than the old POS's.
Let me explain. A store chain like Target will be doing hundreds of thousands of transactions per minute, all transactions for all stores will be done via their servers located in Bumfuck, Missouri (because it was cheap), these typically will be traditional mainframes running Unix as your bog standard X86 cant handle the number of transactions. So POS terminals are simply dumb
Not a data breach (Score:1)
Wow (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Got things done?
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yeah but desk jobs were so boring then.
As aside, dialing a few long distance numbers in a row on rotary phone sucked too, made finger hurt. And fucking typewriters and triplicate carbon.
nope, don't want to go back
Once again, outsourcing your IT for the fail (Score:3)
I just love seeing Fortune 500 companies getting bit in the ass over and over and over when they go cheap, outsource critical IT functions to some sleaze ball outfit in India, and refuse to learn their lessons. Home Depot, Target, Yahoo, Marriott, Equifax, etc.
One of these days, you'll see some megacorp get so badly raped it will outright destroy the company, and the C level idiots will be hounded for years by share holder lawsuits.
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One wonders why you are enamored with gays.
Forgot to update the Certificate (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
not have a plan in place to allow for cash payments and even handwritten receipts
Because the cost to train staff on how to do this, and the cost to purchase and maintain those supplies, would be far more expensive than the the portion of sales they lost.
Or maybe a printout of all the products and prices for each cash register.
120,000 items in a typical store (I could only find a number for Walmart, but I'd expect target to be on the same magnitude) So you're printing out 5-10 copies of a 24,000 page (500 items per page doesn't even seem reasonable...) long document at a minimum of every week at each store. Just the cost of maintaining that process would far
Windows (Score:1)
What a surprise, it's Windows again. Target runs most of their POS software on Microsoft. However, their pharmacy runs on Linux. [expertmarket.com] I bet the pharmacy was the only part of the store still operating. Designing a critical system around Windows should be a firing offence.
Re: (Score:2)
What a surprise, it's Windows again. Target runs most of their POS software on Microsoft. However, their pharmacy runs on Linux. [expertmarket.com] I bet the pharmacy was the only part of the store still operating. Designing a critical system around Windows should be a firing offence.
Oooh, Microsoft astromods don't like that atall. Should be obvious to all that Microsoft remains the same slimeball Microsoft, nothing has changed. Just don't believe the new cuddly Microsoft spin, it's a lie. Microsoft always has been a lie.
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Gonad. Target uses a Windows-based point of sale system. It is a practical certainty that it is running Windows on the backend. If you have any evidence otherwise then please post it. Otherwise, fuck you and your Microsoft overlords.
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So far nothing has been posted that it was Windows that failed.
Smells like a Windows failure. [red-gate.com] Probably is a Windows failure, given that Target is a Windows shop. [expertmarket.com] Now run along little shill, you have some dick to suck.
Re: (Score:2)
nothing says it was a Windows failure
Wrong. Target being a Windows shop says it was, in all probability, a Windows failure. Random anonymous Microsoft scrotum licker's strenuous denial notwithstanding.
Target running DNS in the Cloud? (Score:2)
Grow up snowflake (Score:2)
Every article on /. has many politically incorrect comments, tons of comments claiming others have low IQs (implying that is bad... so anti-retard?) At least as many comments are anti-jew, other anti-races, stereotype references, anti-Nation, anti-government, or some odd posts that lead to photos of gaping ass holes...some are photos with Trump's mouth open ;-) the last 3 years multiple anti-Trump statements picking on the pro-authoritarian minority's Führer.