Starbucks: Cash register outage resolved, stores will open Saturday

DENVER - A Friday night computer outage that affected thousands of Starbucks stores across the United States and Canada has been resolved, the company said, and stores are set to open as usual Saturday morning.

Starbucks apologized for the inconvenience, the Associated Press reported. The company did not explain the outage, which affected cash registers at 7,000 stores in the United States and 1,000 in Canada.

The outage, which hit around 7:30 ET Friday, created a party-like atmosphere in some stores with baristas giving away free drinks to would-be customers.

At the Starbucks on Denver's 16th Street pedestrian mall, baristas were giving out one free grande drink to each customer, along with apologies.

The store said it would close at 8:00 p.m. local time "due to technical difficulties."

Store workers confirmed their computers were down across the company, but declined to give their names.

The company said its stores would remain open and continue to serve customers, though there were reports on Twitter that some Starbucks had shut their doors due to the lack of payment systems.

The outage affected Starbucks in both the United States and Canada, as well as Starbucks' Evolution Fresh and Teavana stores.

In a statement on its website, Starbucks said the outage was caused by a failure in its daily computer system refresh and that it was "actively working to resolve the outage."

"We apologize to our customers for any inconvenience or confusion," the statement said.

The outage shouldn't touch Starbucks' bottom line. It reported record quarterly earnings on Thursday, with net revenues of $4.6 billion.