A ransomware attack on a third-party software vendor has left Starbucks facing serious operating difficulties. Systems used by the Seattle-based coffee giant to manage employee schedules and track hours worked were affected by an attack on Blue Yonder, a supply chain software supplier that the company contracted with. Starbucks’ ability to compensate its baristas has been hampered by the affected back-end procedures.
The business has reassured its employees that steps are being made to guarantee they receive accurate compensation. But while it waits for the problem to be fixed, Starbucks has been forced to use manual solutions.
Blue Yonder’s private cloud services were the focus of the initial attack on November 21, which severely disrupted its global clientele. Despite reporting consistent progress in its recovery operations, the Arizona-based company—which has been owned by Panasonic since 2021—has not yet provided a projected date for the complete restoration of its systems.
(Blue) Yonder, an online assault
Blue Yonder’s software is essential to Starbucks’ North American operations since it enables the coffee firm to automate shift scheduling and staff time tracking. In order to maintain operations, Starbucks locations in the US and Canada have had to switch back to manual procedures like pen-and-paper scheduling because the ransomware attack rendered these systems ineffective.
Starbucks has promised consumers that service and store hours will not be impacted by the outage. Behind the scenes, though, the business is facing serious administrative difficulties. Starbucks admitted that payroll processing for November 29 would be based on pre-scheduled shifts rather than real hours worked in a note to employees, as reported by Bloomberg News. For employees who took time off or took on additional shifts during the impacted period, this could result in disparities.
Starbucks has given store managers templates to manually create schedules for the week of December 9 in order to address the issues. This short-term strategy deviates from the business’s custom of creating timetables three weeks in advance.
In its statement to staff, the corporation said, “We hope that this outage won’t continue to affect payroll processing for upcoming weeks.” “But in the event that the outage persists, we are still searching for methods to enhance pay processing and accuracy.”
Last week, Blue Yonder, a company that serves a variety of merchants, including Fortune 500 firms and grocery chains, disclosed that its managed services hosted in private cloud environments had been impacted by the ransomware attack. However, Microsoft Azure-hosted public cloud services remained unaffected. As a result, the attack affected a number of industries, including grocery chains in the US and the UK.
