Target Suffers Another Outage as Technical Issues Continue to Plague the Retailer
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Target shoppers had to navigate another temporary system outage on Tuesday that rendered inoperative the retailer’s website, mobile app and even some store registers.
In an email to FN, a company spokesperson confirmed yesterday afternoon’s “payment processing issue,” which prevented customers from making purchases in a number of the big-box chain’s locations.
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The spokesperson also said that the Target.com homepage was down. (The site displayed a message reading, “We’re sorry! This page is currently unavailable. Please try again later.”) Similarly, its app encountered loading problems.
“Within an hour, our technology teams identified and began to remedy the issue to limit the impact on our guests,” the spokesperson explained. “This was not a security-related issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate our guests’ patience.”
It’s not the first time this year Target has faced technical hiccups.
Over a mid-June weekend, social media erupted with complaints about a two-hour-long cash register outage that hit stores nationwide. Customers were unable to complete transactions in physical locations, costing the retailer several millions in sales, based on several expert tallies.
Less than 24 hours later, a smaller number of Target outposts were hit with a data-processing issue, resulting in those locations being unable to accept credit cards for roughly 90 minutes. CEO Brian Cornell addressed the technical snafu in a subsequent interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” calling it a “disappointing performance.”
Target is also only a few years removed from a historic data breach that affected more than 40 million consumers during the 2013 holiday season and resulted in an $18.5 million company payout to shoppers in 2017.
Despite this summer’s outages, the Minneapolis-based firm logged same-store sales of 3.4% during the second quarter, growing about 10% over the last two years — its best performance, said the retail giant, in more than a decade. In the past year, Target has also accelerated its omnichannel strategy with same-day fulfillment options, and it has remodeled and opened more stores.
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