All cash registers on campus shut down Tuesday between 5:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. It affected Lenoir and Ram’s Head dining halls, along with Alpine Bagel Café, Pit Stop and Student Stores.
“It really slowed down the lines in Lenoir and Ram’s Head significantly,” said Scott Myers, director of food and vending at Lenoir Dining Hall.
Myers said the network connection was fluctuating between 5:45 p.m. and 6:15 p.m., but it only went out completely for about 20 minutes.
Elisha Walker, a cashier at Lenoir Mainstreet, had to write down students’ information, such as credit card numbers and expiration dates, or their OneCard information.
Walker, a junior French major, said cashiers had to round the numbers for the prices because the computers were not working.
“We had to guess the prices for items that we did not know the prices for,” she said.
And although this type of problem has occurred before, it generally doesn’t affect revenue.
The manager at Alpine, Paul Hartley, said this happens every once in a while, but it didn’t affect sales Tuesday night, as Alpine employees were able to get everyone through the line.
Callie Harris, a junior Journalism and Mass Communications major, was working at Student Stores during the crash. She said she had between five and 10 customers who were not able to make purchases.
“A couple students came back later when the system was running,” Harris said. “The others came back Wednesday morning.”
Harris said she has worked there for almost two years and she had never been there during a crash before.
Myers said he was confused as the why the outage was so drastic.
“I’m still trying to figure out why the system shut down. It should’ve operated at a lesser capacity,” he said. “We work with the company that supports our system and we continually make upgrades to it. The way that it failed last night is not a frequent type of thing. Generally, we lose a part of register capability, for 10 or 15 minutes. It’s maybe a once every two years type of thing.”
To get the day's news and headlines in your inbox each morning, sign up for our email newsletters.
