Coverage: Target suffers checkout problems

Target has reported persistent checkout problems over the weekend after a system outage on Saturday.

Spencer Kimball had the news for CNBC:

Target customers Sunday reported issues checking out at stores across the country, after registers were down for nearly two hours Saturday due to a system outage that created long lines.

Customers said card readers weren’t working and they had to pay in cash.

In a statement to CNBC, a Target spokesperson said the company’s payment processor, NCR, experienced issues at one of its data centers. As a consequence, Target was unable to process card payments at some stores for about 90 minutes.

The spokesperson said the issue was not security related and was not connected to the outage on Saturday. The issue has since been resolved and payments are being processed normally, according to Target.

CNN’s Rob McLean reported the system outage and the checkout problems were unrelated:

For the second straight day, Target checkout lines across the United States were scenes of confusion and delay. Many Targets on Sunday were unable to accept credit card payments for more than an hour.

“Like many other companies, Target uses NCR as a vendor to help accept payments, and on Sunday afternoon NCR experienced an issue at one of their data centers,” Target said.

Target (TGT) said the issue was resolved by Sunday evening and that it wasn’t related to security. It also indicated that “no payment information was compromised at any time.”

NCR could not be reached for comment Sunday evening.

Kelly Tyko from USA Today quoted an expert as saying the outage was bound to happen:

Eric Schmidt, chief information security officer at Butler University in Indianapolis, wasn’t surprised to learn that the outage was related to maintenance.

“Weekends are a normal maintenance time for most IT shops,” Schmidt said. “Retail is different especially with stores being open seven days a week.”

Sometimes, Schmidt said, even a simple upgrade doesn’t go as planned.

“It’s one of those things that happens, unfortunately,” he said.

Target’s last widespread register outage happened June 15, 2014, exactly five years to the day of Saturday’s issue. Reck said the 2014 outage was related to a network issue.

Target.com and other Target systems were unaffected during Saturday’s outage, Reck confirmed.

During the 2013 holiday shopping season, Target suffered a massive data breach, which affected more than 100 million customers.