Panera Bread customers and employees reported experiencing outages in the restaurant chain’s ordering system, mobile apps, loyalty programs and more on March 22.
Although the IT outage slowed operations for a time, Panera Bread stores managed to remain open. Two weeks later, the systems, websites and customer service lines are back online.
Although some employees reportedly complained Regarding the lack of transparency about the situation, Panera did not release further information about the outage on its site. The company also did not respond to Dark Reading’s request for comment.
Some customers, those with personal information linked to Panera loyalty accounts, are concerned about a data leak.
“My biggest concern was not the loss of free drinks and gift card balance, but of personal data in a hacker attack,” a user with the pseudonym “bartolish” he wrote in the r/Panera subreddit.
Cybersecurity expert Sean Deuby, principal technologist at Semperis, said he would not rule out ransomware as the cause of Panera’s outages.
“Although details about the nationwide IT outage suffered by Panera Bread are slowly coming in, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they were hit by a ransomware attack,” Deuby said in a statement. “We hope that Panera stores backup data offline and has a robust response and recovery plan in place to address this threat.”