Today, Starbucks [SBUX] announced their free Wi-Fi offer with AT&T, their new wireless partner, at participating storefronts.
In addition to qualified AT&T wireless customers, Starbucks Card holders are also eligible for free two-hour Wi-Fi access, based upon the terms described for ther Starbucks Card registration program. As a result of this, TONS o’ people who didn’t bother to register their Starbucks Cards before are now scrambling to get onboarded for the feature.
Unfortunately for me and other long-time Starbucks Card supporters, we now have to struggle alongside all of the newbies in trying to access our online accounts and to agree to the free Wi-Fi’s TOS. Argh!
Even more unfortunate is the overload at Starbucks’ servers in trying to keep up with the increased demand; lots of people (myself included) are experiencing authentication failures because the login servers are unable to keep up with the traffic. The presentation of this is: invalid username and/or password. Thus, the literally overwhelming response to the deal announcement!
A quick call to the Starbucks Card customer service confirmed that they’ve been fielding questions about the service outage, but according to Michael (the frazzled CSR that answered my call), they don’t have an ETA for the outage resolution. They’re hoping for service restoration soon, but no guarantees.
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }