Panera Bread suffered an IT outage beginning on 22 March 2024 that ran for roughly a week. Internal systems, telephones, point-of-sale systems, the website and the mobile app were all affected. The company later confirmed the cause as ransomware.
Point Of Sale Is The Whole Business
A restaurant chain without tills is not a degraded restaurant chain. Orders cannot be taken as normal, loyalty accounts do not resolve, and card payment either fails or falls back to whatever manual process staff can improvise.
We have recorded the same dependency at Suncor, where 1,500 fuel sites went cash-only, and at Dole, where the only public measure of the disruption was shoppers noticing gaps on shelves. Retail outages get counted in customer inconvenience because nothing else is collected.
A Week Is A Long Time To Say Nothing
The confirmation that this was ransomware came after the outage. For the week itself, staff and customers had an unexplained failure and no account of it.
Graded medium: no operation was named, no entry route was published, and no figure for affected data, transactions or cost has been released.
Compiled from public reporting and the company’s subsequent confirmation, listed below. No operation has been identified and no cost or transaction figure was published. Corrections: corrections@forensicpost.com.
- Panera Bread week-long IT outage caused by ransomware attackBleepingComputer