Archived Companywide outage

[Poofresh]

i took a day off today, but visited a target. i thought it was weird that this target didnt have cashiers, just self-checkout. im like wtf. is automation taking over

 

[Poofresh]

i wouldnt be surprised if the outtage leaked personal informations of all customers to hackers again. it sounds like a 2 types of attack to me.

 

[Mikuhl]

Taytay already said it was just the registers basically DDOSing HQ. This is totally an internal thing and no one was the culprit.

 

[Bosch]

I don’t think hand keying UPCs was a valid solution. They could have easily put a sign in the door warning potential guests that they will have to wait at least 30 minutes to an hour to check out. But no the ETL is worried about their bonus and can’t imagine losing that 2 hours of sales.

I worked the door when I got updates from the TM's that were working the door. "hey folks just so ya know, our registers all but the 4 at GS are down, lines are super long and slow. You are welcome to come in and shop but you are fair warned getting out may take a LOOOOONG time. Your choice." Some came in, others said they would come back, others were like "we were warned". No one was really mad, at least being greeted with that warning. People who were already in store? Another story.

 

[SugarSugar]

We had a team member pull out a calculator, find the price for each item and add tax and do that for guests lol. He wrote down every item we sold. He’s my hero for today

hmm.. that sounds like a liability issue if guests decide they want to return something. so he totaled everything under one item? how did he process the payment?

 

[IWishIKnew]

Our Temp SD was on the phone and we ended up taking guest carts and tagging them with guest phone numbers and when the system came back up we started calling them to pick up their stuff. We filled a valley in the back three carts wide. Only to start calling people in and for the system to crash again as I left today.

That's kind of what my store did, but I don't think they put phone numbers on. A surprising number of people came back for their carts.

What they should have done is told people they'd get 10% off their order if they came back to get them.

Our store wen the route of posting people by the doors and telling them the registers are down. We have a lot of non-english-speaking guests, so there were some issues with people not quite understanding, but guests were surprisingly chill about the whole thing.

 

[sunnydays]

“greeters” was basically what we did as well but we needed more than 1

the official direction was to offer $5 off btw

 

[RedcardReba]

This is twice in a year that we've had serious POS problems.

 

[AlwaysBackstock]

Who else has a dozen u boats with backstock that couldn’t be located during the outage? Cleaning up the backroom and go backs will be the main Father’s Day issues.

Had a full uboat of toy backstock and I know the second I come in in the morning I’m gonna get my ass chewed out for not emptying my vehicles the day before truck day. We put notes on backstock vehicles stating the date and system down. Hopefully that will send the message.

 

[MajorChomp]

Had a full uboat of toy backstock and I know the second I come in in the morning I’m gonna get my ass chewed out for not emptying my vehicles the day before truck day. We put notes on backstock vehicles stating the date and system down. Hopefully that will send the message.

We have two flats of backstock that couldn’t get done because the system was down for backstocking and the whole store was busy doing 50 carts of abandoned carts of guests plus standard stays for the store so they were neck deep in pushing those out. Plus when everything came back on we all had to jump into fast service.

 

[Amaylyn]

This highlights a larger issue. We need a protocol/procedure for registers down. Some stores closed, some handed snacks, some did other stuff.

My store put as many people as possible on working registers (8 out of 13, including guest services) and by "working", I mean they had cash in them and weren't rebooting or having other malfunctions besides the outage. Still had to scan between 15-20 times before an item registered. Someone from corporate was here, she told me to sell every item individually. As in one-item-per-transaction. (eesh) Starbucks and cafe handed out tons of samples, ETL at the door greeting guests with a warning, announcements made often over the PA system, and we also offered to put baskets and carts on hold for guests with their names attached who could come back later. Anyone who couldn't jump on a register up front (Starbucks and cafe and excess cashiers) did drive-ups and OPUs. We had the back room TL and the HR ETL going around updating the cashiers and the guests as information about the outage trickled in. I'm a little proud of the way it was handled here... but I think it was because we were in the middle of a visit. 😂

 

[SugarSugar]

My store put as many people as possible on working registers (8 out of 13, including guest services) and by "working", I mean they had cash in them and weren't rebooting or having other malfunctions besides the outage. Still had to scan between 15-20 times before an item registered. Someone from corporate was here, she told me to sell every item individually. As in one-item-per-transaction. (eesh) Starbucks and cafe handed out tons of samples, ETL at the door greeting guests with a warning, announcements made often over the PA system, and we also offered to put baskets and carts on hold for guests with their names attached who could come back later. Anyone who couldn't jump on a register up front (Starbucks and cafe and excess cashiers) did drive-ups and OPUs. We had the back room TL and the HR ETL going around updating the cashiers and the guests as information about the outage trickled in. I'm a little proud of the way it was handled here... but I think it was because we were in the middle of a visit. 😂

What's the purpose of one item per transaction?

 

[Frontlanegirl]

This highlights a larger issue. We need a protocol/procedure for registers down. Some stores closed, some handed snacks, some did other stuff.

We were taking directions from our DTL.

 

[Amaylyn]

What's the purpose of one item per transaction?

She mentioned her computer crashing if she tried to put more than one item in at a time. To be fair, when she said it she was in the middle of it all trying to scan a greeting card for the 30th time. It gave the illusion of more activity happening faster while not fixing a damn thing. 👍

 

[GreasyGary]

Wow, some of you guys held carts for guests? We told them because of the volume of people wanting stuff held we couldn't do it.

I'm actually surprised people came back for them too. I'd have expected that less than half would be back if we did hold anything.

 

[IWishIKnew]

She mentioned her computer crashing if she tried to put more than one item in at a time. To be fair, when she said it she was in the middle of it all trying to scan a greeting card for the 30th time. It gave the illusion of more activity happening faster while not fixing a damn thing. 👍

Our SCOs worked this way. If you did one item per transaction it would work. For part of the day, at least. This was relayed to me by another HL TM, so it might only have been during part of the outage.

 

[Anelmi]

What's the purpose of one item per transaction?

One item would scan but anything after would take up to 20 attempts (if you were lucky). So I told guests I could do an item at a time if they were ok w it. This didn’t work all the time though.

We started holding carts for guests but it became a cluster so ETL put the kibosh on it pretty quickly.

 

[cestlavie]

Our store had 4 checkout advocate call outs on top of the outage so that left us constantly calling for backup and 3 three tiered carts of go backs to do in the morning.

 

[Amaylyn]

We started holding carts for guests but it became a cluster so ETL put the kibosh on it pretty quickly.

They divided carts into baskets and piled them along a wall.

 

[sfslackey]

Wow, some of you guys held carts for guests? We told them because of the volume of people wanting stuff held we couldn't do it.

I'm actually surprised people came back for them too. I'd have expected that less than half would be back if we did hold anything.

We had a bunch of held carts and someone actually came back before closing to retrieve it. We will see about the rest, holding them until tomorrow.

 

[Antennae]

Imagine a life where what you buy at Target is worth coming back for. Lmao.

 

[Fluttervale]

Taytay already said it was just the registers basically DDOSing HQ. This is totally an internal thing and no one was the culprit.

But we know that's not entirely true because of mywork. And idk about you guys, but our wifi went out too.

 

[Antennae]

But how will profits be in Oct?????????

 

[Mikuhl]

But how will profits be in Oct?????????

We're getting Galaxy Buds and Nest Hub Max in October from DPCI's that were found. Hopefully there's more good stuff electronics is getting.

 

[Sarakiel]

The even numbered stores is interesting. I wonder if Target has even numbered stores going to one data center and odd numbered stores into another...

Very similiar, but they all still route up to the TNC in Brooklyn Park. For example, several years ago stores were having an issue where half of their Price Scanners would always stay offline and half would stay on. Long story short, after being able to trace back the logs from sample scanners we were able to identify that one of the two servers dedicated to handling host addresses for the scanners was offline and needed to be replaced. Yes, the scanners are divided between the two servers to balance workload based upon their serial numbers.