Retail Giant Target Suffers Another Checkout System Outage, Second in Two Days

Target has suffered its second straight day of checkout counters experiencing a point-of-sale systems failure, preventing one of the largest retailers in the world from processing debit or credit transactions for several hours.

Target Reduced to Only Accepting Cash, Gift Card Transactions After Second Day of Point-of-Sale System Outage

Retail giant Target suffered another point-of-sale (POS) system outage today, preventing it from processing any debit or credit transactions for several hours only a day after a two-hour outage of its POS system created hour long lines and a whole army of cranky Twitter users.

RELATED: 9 OF THE BEST TWITTER REACTIONS TO THE FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM OUTAGES

Yesterday's POS outage became fodder for Twitter as #TargetDown quickly started trending on the social media network as frustrated shoppers waited in lines that stretched down aisles and unpurchased merchandise began piling up in carts abandoned by shoppers who either didn't anticipate needing cash to make their purchases or who simply gave up after waiting in slowly moving lines. The outage occurred without warning and it was total, knocking off the POS system that processes credit and debit transactions for the entire US.

Target says that its outage wasn't caused by a hack or some other form of security breach, a touchy subject for the retailer, and the outage came to an end after about two hours when the POS system came back online once Target's IT department had tracked down the unspecified issue.

In a statement released yesterday on Twitter, Target said "our technology team worked quickly to identify and fix the issue, and we apologize for the inconvenience and frustration this caused for our guests. After an initial but thorough review, we can confirm that this was not a data breach or security related issue, and no guests information was compromised at any time."

https://t.co/XdKq8SFWjQ pic.twitter.com/RTDS33eo3L

— Target (@Target) June 15, 2019

The terrible timing of today's outage comes on Father's day weekend, usually a lucrative period for retailers selling clothes, gadgets, and other potential gift items. Target wasted no time placing the blame on NCR, a payment processing vendor who had an unspecified issue in one of its data centers. The combination of high-traffic and two seemingly unrelated technical failures certainly frayed a lot of nerves yesterday

Target itself acknowledged as much, saying that "We know many guests had a frustrating shopping experience in our stores this weekend. For that, we are truly sorry."