Recent outages

[Goodlife2012]

The recent aws outage which caused havoc on the customers of toast taught us that we need to learn how to adapt to an off the grid situation.  The offline mode did not work AT ALL.  We lost all but one of our stations and we were not able to print tickets in the kitchen, see drinks or food on the various monitors, nothing.  Upon trying to call toast for help we got a robotic answering machine basically saying we were on our own.  We couldn’t get any help from anyone on line, it was almost a lost day, cash only and no support.  For what we pay for this service, I feel pretty ripped off.  Toast needs to do better and have a back up plan for when something like this happens.  Otherwise, we need to figure out how to function without them.  Very dissatisfied with the lack of customer service.  

[borealis123]

I don't understand why Toast doesn't have some sort of redundancy rather than relying solely on AWS. It makes no sense. It's like a restaurant only having one vendor and then that vendor goes bust and so does your business. Google? Microsoft Azure?

[olisquare]

For us, the biggest issue was losing connection to all third-party ordering platforms. Normally, customers could’ve still ordered through those since they were working fine, but because our accounts were integrated through Toast, everything went down together.

I’m the account owner on our third-party platforms, and I even called them to try to bypass the Toast integration (we had their tablets up and running) but they told me Toast wouldn’t allow us to change our own account settings.

What made things worse was that Toast kept randomly reopening and closing our listings on those platforms. Orders would go through for a few minutes, then get canceled automatically, making us look terrible to customers.

That feeling of total powerlessness, not just over Toast, but over all our major ordering channels was incredibly frustrating and honestly a little scary. No business should have that much control over others’ operations.

It’s wild that such a large tech company didn’t think this through. Whether it’s intentional (to discourage restaurants from going direct) or just bad design, it’s a serious reliability problem.