Security News
Omni Hotels & Resorts has been experiencing a chain-wide outage that brought down its IT systems on Friday, impacting reservation, hotel room door lock, and point-of-sale systems. The hotel chain's phone helpline is also down, with a recorded message saying, "Thank you for calling Omni Hotels and Resorts. We are sorry we are currently experiencing technical difficulties and are unable to answer your call. Please try your call again at a later time."
Since Saturday, U.S. food chain giant Panera Bread has been experiencing a nationwide outage that has impacted its IT systems, including online ordering, POS systems, phones, and various internal systems. "Our team is still working on getting the systems online. Please look for resolution once this is fixed and follow up with us later in the week. Thanks," Panera Bread added earlier today.
In what was originally being called a serious IT outage at the end of last week, the union confirmed to The Register today that the incident is now being treated as an attack, the full extent of which is still being assessed. The CWU told us on March 22 that its email services weren't working and that it has engaged third-party cybersecurity experts who have been on site since 0900 UTC on March 21.
UK bakery chain Greggs is the latest victim of recent point of sale system outages that forced store closures at large retail chains over the past few weeks. Greggs is a bakery chain with 2,300 branches across the UK, selling sausage rolls, baked goods, sandwiches, and sweets.
McDonald's has blamed a third-party service provider's configuration change, not a cyberattack, for the global outage that forced many of its fast-food restaurants to close. According to a statement shared by the company's Chief Information Officer Brian Rice, the global technology system outage began around midnight CDT on Friday.
McDonald's restaurants are suffering global IT outages that prevent employees from taking orders and accepting payments, causing some stores to close for the day. The outages started overnight and are impacting restaurants globally, including those in the USA, Japan, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, New Zealand, and the UK. "We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved," McDonald's said in a statement to BleepingComputer.
Facebook and Instagram users worldwide have been logged out of the sites and are having trouble logging in, receiving errors that their passwords are incorrect. The outage has caused people to automatically get logged out of Meta and for Instagram to no longer work, giving errors like "Couldn't refresh feed."
US healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group announced that its subsidiary Optum suffered a cyberattack by "Nation-state" hackers on the Change Healthcare platform, forcing the company to shut down IT systems and various services.Its subsidiary, Optum Solutions, operates the Change Healthcare platform, which is the largest payment exchange platform between doctors, pharmacies, healthcare providers, and patients in the US healthcare system.
Tens of thousands of U.S. customers from Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T are complaining Thursday morning about the lack of wireless service or interruptions to service. "The San Francisco Fire Department published a"cell phone service outage" announcement saying that "AT&T wireless customers can't make or receive any phone calls, although the 911 center is operational.
Tens of thousands of U.S. customers from Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T are complaining Thursday morning about the lack of wireless service or interruptions to service. According to data from problem tracking site Downdetector more than 73,000 AT&T customers from multiple states - including North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida, reported a lack of service.