Backup Plans That Work: Business Lessons from Starbucks’ Tech Crisis

April 29, 2025 – Looking back at a revealing moment from November 2024

When Technology Fails

In November 2024, hackers hit Starbucks with ransomware, shutting down their scheduling system across thousands of stores. Instead of closing up shop, store managers pulled out notebooks and started writing down employee schedules by hand.

This quick thinking kept coffee flowing and offered valuable lessons for business owners who face their own technology challenges.

Back to Basics That Work

When Starbucks’ Blue Yonder scheduling system went down on November 21, store managers across the US and Canada quickly switched to old-school methods:

• Paper schedules posted in break rooms
• Handwritten time cards for tracking hours
• Simple notes to keep track of payroll information

The most impressive part? Customers barely noticed any difference. The core business—making and selling coffee—operated smoothly without the complex software it usually relied on.

The Computer Layer vs. The Business Basics

This situation shows something important about today’s business technology: many of our complicated computer systems sit on top of basic business tasks that businesses have handled for generations.

Making employee schedules, tracking work hours, and processing payroll are fundamental needs businesses managed long before computers existed. Technology makes these jobs easier and helps handle larger numbers, but it doesn’t change the work.

The Starbucks example reminds us how quickly a business can remove computer complexity when needed and get back to the fundamental tasks. This ability to adapt is crucial for business continuity and resilience.

The Hidden Weakness of All-In-One Systems

There’s an interesting twist here. When all your information sits in one central computer system, a single attack can simultaneously shut down thousands of locations. Yet each location could keep functioning with simple paper records that hackers can’t touch.

This isn’t saying technology is bad. However, it shows the importance of understanding your core business processes, separate from the tools you use to manage them. When businesses lose sight of these basics beneath layers of technology, they become vulnerable in unexpected ways.

Practical Takeaways for Business Owners

For business owners trying to balance technology with practical business needs, here are valuable insights:

1. Know your business beyond your tools.. Businesses that understand their fundamental processes can adapt when technology fails. When Starbucks needed to track employee hours without their scheduling software, they could—because the basic task remained clear and straightforward.
2. Simple systems provide natural backup.. While computer tools offer efficiency, their complexity can become problematic during disruptions. Keeping the ability to handle essential tasks with pen and paper provides a built-in backup plan that doesn’t require expert help.
3. Retail remains hands-on work. Despite years of technological change, retail and service businesses still revolve around basic human activities. Running a business—serving customers, tracking inventory, scheduling staff—hasn’t fundamentally changed even as our tools have evolved.

Building Business Resilience That Works

As a business owner, you can create stronger operations that withstand disruptions by taking simple steps:

• Practice running critical functions without computers occasionally
• Keep paper backup forms for essential business processes
• Make sure all employees understand the basic operations, not just which buttons to click
• Evaluate new technology based on how it helps rather than complicates your core business

As Starbucks showed during their computer crisis, sometimes your best backup plan isn’t another technical system, but a return to simpler methods that have worked for generations. In a world where technology grows more complex every day, the ability to keep your doors open when systems fail might be your most substantial business advantage.

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This article looks back at the Starbucks ransomware incident from November 21, 2024, based on reporting from The Seattle Times, Bloomberg News, and Business Insider published between November 25-26, 2024.