After massive Target outage, some stores say registers running again | Hacker News Reader

After massive Target outage, some stores say registers running again

usatoday.com

28 pointsproee21 comments

Spent an hour in line today, which would've been longer but the person in front of me gave up, and the person in front of her only rung up ~25% of her items. I had about 10 items and it took about 20 minutes to get everything scanned completely. I'm guessing a bad config pushed out that borked networking code so some poor router or server was doing all the work. Looking forward to the post mortem (yeah right).

> Spent an hour in line today

Why on earth would you spend an hour in line at Target? Did you need to buy medication or something and it was the only option? I would have given up and gone elsewhere after three minutes.

Sunk cost

Furthermore: escalation of commitment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

That almost perfectly describes those of Gaelic lineage.

Depending on what you're buying (groceries for a family, say), driving to another store and picking everything out again could easily take well over an hour.

Which begs the question, why did they push out an update or a configuration change in the middle of the day?

When should you push out an update? At the start of the day? At the end of the day? Either of those would mean the whole day was broken. In the middle of the day means one day of trading, one day broken in the worst case and then fixing overnight.

At least I would assume they would try to create a set of test locations that they would first update instead of everything. I understand that there may be differences in hardware but I still find it odd they wouldn't have a more limited deployment. Even with all the testing you could ever do pushing an update to everything at once without any real world testing seems absurd.

Also I think it is hard to ask when you should push the update but based on their hours it seems like you should not push an update on Saturday of all things. If you are not going to do limited testing first then I think you should deploy 8-9 on a weekday, I would guess Tuesday would be the day with least traffic so do that.

Under no circumstances should you push regular updates on a Saturday, especially since that requires work Sunday if anything goes wrong and impacts what are probably 2 of the top 3 days of the week for this kind of shopping.

We thought we were smart not to go to Costco on a Saturday...

Going to costco near closing time seems to help avoid crowd.

I find Walmart at 2 AM to be the best time to buy groceries

I wonder if we'll ever get a decent post-mortem on how this happened.

This just makes me think that if Walmart ever made it so the grocery pickup didn't use an immense amount of plastic bags so many people would use it.

I tried using it once and they were selling reusable bags so I assumed they required you to use their reusable bags. This was unfortunately not the case instead they put everything including the bags in their own plastic bag I just felt awful and never used it again.

I know some people who still use it because it is great to be able to look around your kitchen and know exactly what you need but it seems like there are so many people like me that would use it but don't do so because of the massive waste.

I bet Kubernetes was somehow responsible for this outage.

A friend works at Target corporate, and yes from what I've heard kubernetes is probably involved.

Tweet stating that this was 5 years to the day from their last register outage. Sounds more like some certs expired.

Unless you get an ATM in there, getting pure paper registers won't fix everyone needing to pay via card.

Does Target still not allow Apple Pay?

They do support it now, as of a few months ago.

Can I use my target card with it? That sweet 5% off

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