All of Barnes & Noble’s Computer Systems Are Down, and I do Mean All of Them
Barnes & Noble is going through the mother of all system crashes right now.
Some time late Friday night or early Saturday morning the retailer’s entire IT backbone crashed, and it took almost all of the company’s functionality with it. Everything from the cash registers to the catalog lookup is down. Even the Nook platform is down.
Edit: A number of B&N employees have called me on this, and they are right when they said that I exaggerated. The systems were still functional, albeit severely crippled by what some reports described as a ransomware/trojan/virus.
What’s even worse is that it’s Tuesday morning, and everything is still borked. I just checked the B&N website, and while I can see the site I cannot log in, much less buy anything. I also cannot access any of the Nook features.
UPDATE: B&N’s systems are mostly back up around 3 pm eastern.
There are unconfirmed reports on Reddit that B&N has been attacked by a virus or other malware. Given that we are now on day four of this situation, it is more than likely that they are correct.
Second Update: Yep, they were hacked.
I would advise you to start combing through your credit card statements for B&N charges. If I shopped there I would contact the credit card companies so they could add security checks on my cards just in case a hacker did make off with credit card numbers.
As we recall from the Bowker hack in 2018, sometimes the first public evidence of a hack is bogus credit card charges.
Thanks, Steve!
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