Apple Store Point Of Sale Systems Go Down Again Today, Outage Continues
Some Apple Stores have had their point-of-sale systems go down repeatedly today, TechCrunch has learned. There was an extensive outage early Thursday morning and there has been an ongoing outage this evening in some stores.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's retail fleet lost its ability to ring up sales twice within roughly 36 hours: an extensive point-of-sale failure hit early Thursday morning, November 14, 2013, and a further ongoing outage struck some stores by Thursday evening per TechCrunch's report. The corpus holds no earlier coverage of Apple retail infrastructure problems — the closest prior thread is cosmetic, Apple's 2011 online store refresh adding Twitter and Facebook sharing — so there is no documented history of repeat failures to draw on here.
What the coverage does show is how far a register outage now travels: the same-day pickup list spans AppleInsider, 9to5Mac, CNET, iPhone Hacks, and iDownloadBlog, an unusually broad echo for what is an operational incident rather than a product launch, reflecting how central the stores have become to Apple's retail story.
First-order effects
- Customers at the affected Apple Stores face stalled or impossible checkouts during the outage windows, with store staff absorbing queues they cannot process through the normal register flow.
- Apple's retail operations team is forced into incident mode twice in two days, diagnosing whether the fault lies in store hardware or the shared point-of-sale backend while sales sit idle.
Second-order effects
- A repeat failure this close together puts pressure on Apple to harden its point-of-sale architecture ahead of the holiday shopping season, when store throughput matters most.
- Every minute of dead registers at flagship stores converts directly into lost high-margin device sales, giving Apple's finance side a concrete stake in how fast the fix lands.
Third-order effects
- If centrally managed, network-connected register systems keep producing failures that hit many locations at once, large retail fleets like Apple's face a structural trade-off between unified point-of-sale control and offline resilience — and the balance of that trade-off is genuinely unresolved.
- Repeated incidents of this shape push point-of-sale reliability from a back-office IT concern toward a brand-level risk that retail executives, not just engineers, have to own.
The trend: Retail checkout is consolidating around centrally managed point-of-sale systems, which turns what used to be a single-register malfunction into a fleet-wide outage event.