On Friday night, April 24, 2015, a widespread outage prevented U.S. and Canadian Starbucks stores from using their Point of Sale (POS) systems. Store managers had to choose between giving away free coffee, or closing early. Teavana and Evolution Fresh stores were also affected. Everything was back to normal Saturday morning. This has no connection with hoax coupons for free coffee following an incident that caused the manager of a Philadelphia Starbucks to leave their job there, despite the similar time of year (an interesting coincidence).
The second largest U.S. healthcare data breach of 2017 took place in April, when ransomware may have compromised health information of 500,000 individuals at Airway Oxygen. While Financial and Social Security Numbers were not exposed, there may have been access to names, addresses, dates of birth, contact telephone numbers, medical diagnoses, insurance policy numbers and details of patient services. The FBI was involved, and a third-party cyber-security team assisted with investigation and recommendations for the future. New tools and protections have been put in place.
Tune in next week, when we’ll see more of the future from our past.
