Target register malfunction could have cost $50M in sales: Report

Target may have lost out on tens of millions of dollars in sales when a glitch briefly knocked its registers offline and blocked shoppers from making purchases on Saturday.

The Minnesota-based retailer blamed the outage on an “internal technology issue” that caused registers to malfunction across the country for about two hours on Saturday, one day before Father’s Day. Target said the issue was not a data breach or cybersecurity-related issue.

Given that the malfunction occurred on Saturday, a high-volume shopping day, Target likely lost out on about $50 million in sales during the two-hour window, according to estimates from Kantar Consulting cited by Bloomberg. The projection assumes that most Target stores locations were open for 12 hours that day.

Target declined comment on whether estimates regarding lost sales were accurate.

Ticker Security Last Change Change %
TGT TARGET CORP. 174.73 +2.02 +1.17%
NCR n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a.

“After an initial but thorough review, we can confirm that this was not a data breach or security-related issue, and no guest information was compromised at any time,” Target said in a statement regarding the register glitch. “We appreciate all of our store team members who worked quickly to assist guests and thank everyone involved for their patience.”

Target experienced a second interruption on Sunday when a glitch at a data center run by payments services vendor NCR Corp. briefly left some stores unable to process credit card transactions. Target said the issue was unrelated to its internal technology system or the malfunction that occurred on Saturday.

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Target shares fell by as much as nearly 2 percent on Monday and closed down less than 1 percent. NCR shares also fell slightly.