Company officials confirmed that this was not a security-related issue or data breach Target Corporation, the eighth-largest retailer in the United States, has reportedly suffered a technical glitch that held back checkout lines at Target stores nationwide, frustrating shoppers and potentially reducing sales at a prime time for retailers, a day before Father’s Day. Seemingly, a nearly two-hour outage periodically stopped Target’s cashiers from processing transactions or scanning merchandise as long queues formed in some of the stores. Self-checkout registers, generally the speediest options, were also not working most of the time. The company had temporarily closed few of its stores, including one in San Francisco, rather than risk exasperating shoppers. Sources informed that the technological team of Target had worked rapidly to recognize and fix the issue and apologized for the frustration and inconvenience caused to their customers. Before the company apparently figured out what was wrong, a Target employee was seen notifying customers at a store that they might be unable to check out due to a technical glitch. However, sales were being completed after sporadic delays during the affected half hour. If sources are to be believed, some shoppers were posting on their Twitter accounts as they vented about tediously long lines, but also expressed concerns and sympathy for the Target employees trying to cope with the difficult situation. Target has been supposedly vexed by technology before, most remarkably in 2013 when malware installed in its checkout system resulted in a data theft that exposed personal information over 40 million debit and credit card accounts. That tragedy triggered lawsuits and ultimately led to the exit of its CEO, Gregg Steinhafel. The Minneapolis company stated that the customers trapped in up the checkout slowdown have no reason to worry at all. After an early but thorough review, the company officials could confirm that this was not a security-related issue or data breach, and no guest information was compromised at any point of time, company representatives said. Source Credit: https://www.apnews.com/64c160b310bc492aa48e8d912c8bf45c