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Starbucks’ payment and scheduling system has been hit by a ransomware attack.
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The coffee company has issued guidelines for employees on how to deal with wage disruptions due to the outage.
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The outage at Blue Yonder, which makes the software, also affected supermarkets and Fortune 500 companies.
The software company behind Starbucks’ payment and scheduling system has suffered a days-long ransomware attack, causing outages that are disrupting employee wages.
The attack on Blue Yonder, the company that makes the software, began on November 21 and has disrupted Starbucks’ system for tracking employee time and payments.
According to documents reviewed by Business Insider, Starbucks has issued guidance to its employees on how to handle payment disruptions due to the Blue Yonder outage. Starbucks told employees that pay for the period ending Nov. 17 would remain unchanged, but that discrepancies could occur in the next pay period.
“We will ensure that partners who receive less than their hours worked or scheduled sick and/or vacation days are paid correctly as quickly as possible,” the internal documents say.
According to Bloomberg, the outage has forced employees to keep track of their shifts with pen and paper.
The documents seen by BI show that employees who miss their checks should notify their store managers as soon as possible. Any underpayment will be resolved in the next payment period. Any overpayments resulting from an employee being paid for a scheduled shift from Nov. 18 through Nov. 24 for which he did not report will not have to be repaid, the documents said.
A Starbucks partner in the South said their manager told them Monday that employees who had scheduled paid leave for the affected weeks will not be paid for that time until the outage is resolved.
That’s “potentially very bad for some partners who go on vacation around the holidays,” the partner told Business Insider.
A Starbucks spokesperson told Business Insider that the company is working to ensure its partners are paid for their hours worked with limited disruption, and indicated that the outage has not disrupted customer-facing technology or service at any of its locations.
Blue Yonder’s software is also used by major supermarket chains and Fortune 500 companies, CNN reports.
Similar cyber attacks have left companies like Sony and car dealers across America using pen and paper for administrative tasks and sales transactions.
“Blue Yonder experienced disruptions in the hosted environment of its managed services, which were determined to be the result of a ransomware incident,” a company spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. “Since learning of the incident, the Blue Yonder team has worked diligently with third-party cybersecurity companies to make progress in their recovery process. We have implemented various defensive and forensic protocols.”
The software company currently has no timeline for resolving the issue, according to a web page the company published for customers affected by the attack.
Read the original article on Business Insider
