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Starbucks To Reopen Stores Saturday After Nationwide Outage Impacts Computer System

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A nationwide computer glitch prompted some Starbucks employees to give away free food and coffee at some locations in the Southland.

Register outages impacted the coffee giant's stores across the country and were caused by a failure during a daily system refresh, according to a company spokesperson.

The outage was reported about 4 p.m. Friday and caused some stores to close early, while others had employees writing down orders on paper and giving away free drinks for 30 minutes immediately after the
outage. Other locations had to accept cash-only.

"I wasn't going to walk away," said one patron in response to a cash-only sign. "I love Starbucks. I get it every single day."

The company said via Twitter: "We're sorry about the [point-of-sale] issue and working as fast as we can to fix it. What a week!"

Late Friday, the company said the problem had been resolved and that it plans on opening all stores Saturday.

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