Starbucks Corp. on Monday confirmed that the Seattle-based coffee chain is facing employee-side disruptions following a ransomware attack on third-party vendor, Blue Yonder.
The attack disrupted Starbucks’ back-end processes that affect employee scheduling and hours management, though the company said that it was working to ensure its employees were fully paid for the hours worked. The ransomware attack had not affected consumer-side service.
The ransomware attack on Blue Yonder occurred last week, the Panasonic-owned software supply chain company confirmed in a media statement, according to CNN. As the company reportedly continued to make progress on service restoration, several grocery chains were also affected by the outage, including UK-based supermarkets, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. While several other American companies use Blue Yonder, like Anheuser-Busch, Campbell’s, Dole, Kroger, and Wegmans, none of these companies directly addressed the attack or confirmed if they were affected as well.
Starbucks provided store leaders and managers guidance on how to work around the outage manually and continued to keep employees informed about progress on the third-party cybersecurity attack.
This is not the only cybersecurity blip to affect a major foodservice company this year. Earlier this year, both McDonald’s and Panera reported tech outages that disrupted the customer service side of operations. In the case of McDonald’s, the outage was not due to a security threat, though Panera’s outage was later revealed to be the result of a cybersecurity issue, and employees later filed a class action lawsuit after their personal information was leaked.
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