Leon Davoyan was at a conference in Florida last Monday when he heard about a significant outage within Amazon Web Services (AWS), the giant cloud computing network that underpins much of the internet.
For IT people like Davoyan, the CTO of Dave’s Hot Chicken, it was the stuff of nightmares.
“I just had that feeling in my stomach that’s like, ‘Oh God, I’m not even at my desk,’” Davoyan said. “It could definitely be Armageddon, right?”
His biggest concern was Dave’s POS system, which runs on the cloud. Would the chain even be able to process orders? He began texting his team. And to his relief, they responded with good news: Besides some reporting delays, the POS was working.
Dave’s POS supplier is Qu, which has made reliability one of its calling cards. In this case, the savior was the company’s edge product, known as Qube—a device that sits in the restaurant and acts as a backup if the cloud fails. It runs the same software as Qu’s frontline system, so the transition allows the restaurant to keep operating virtually uninterrupted.
Dave’s has experienced cloud outages before, but this was the first test of Qu’s edge technology. And the results were stark.
“Coincidentally enough, I was next to a brand [at the conference] that was using another POS system, and they were completely down, like just annihilated,” Davoyan said. “The contrast was not very good, but I was very grateful that our systems stayed up. We were just able to work as if it was just another day.”
The 15-hour outage was bad for many restaurant brands, including Starbucks and McDonald’s, whose mobile apps went down; delivery apps like DoorDash; and countless local restaurants using Toast, the popular cloud-based POS system. While the total financial impact on the restaurant industry is unknown, the cost globally could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
That sparked a conversation about the importance of reliable tech. As more restaurant operators switch to cloud-based technology and do more business online, the strength of those networks becomes increasingly important. And it almost goes without saying, but outages are common: AWS had similar issues in 2020 and 2021, for instance, and everyone knows how spotty wi-fi can be.
For Golden Chick, redundancy was one of its top priorities when it was looking for a new POS supplier back in 2020. The Texas-based chain has some big franchisees in the middle of the country, aka Tornado Alley, where storms can wreak havoc on internet connections. Qu’s built-in backup was a huge selling point for those operators.
“They had just recently been impacted by storms or floods or tornadoes, so it means a lot,” said Cynthia Loescher, the chain’s VP of IT. “One day of lost sales or online ordering can be very impactful.” Golden Chick installed Qu systemwide in 2024, and last week’s outage was a “non-issue,” she said.
Qu is far from the only supplier working on this kind of thing. In fact, edge computing was quietly one of the hottest topics at FSTEC in September, where multiple vendors were showing off systems that allow restaurants to process data locally and without an internet connection if necessary.
In the wake of the AWS outage, some of them took to social media to tout how their systems weathered the storm.
“When AWS went down, most restaurant POS systems went dark. NCR Voyix was 100% up,” wrote Nick Belsito, VP of sales for NCR Voyix. “Resilience isn’t luck. It’s core to the design.”
In a blog post, POS provider Square detailed how it was able to remain mostly operational while AWS was AWOL: It operates some of its key products across multiple AWS regions, so that if one region goes down, like in this case, those systems can stay up.
“The AWS outage reinforced the importance of the underlying infrastructure choices we’ve made to strengthen resilience and reliability across our platform,” the company wrote.
In a world of artificial intelligence, sidewalk robots and drone delivery, nerdy topics like edge computing or network redundancy don’t make headlines often. But that was already starting to change before the AWS outage, and the conversation will likely only get louder from here. And if restaurants aren't asking vendors how they're prepared to handle a situation like this, they should be.
“As unfortunate as this was, and we never want this to happen … I think it will put a spotlight on these types of topics more,” said Amir Hudda, Qu’s CEO. “We’ll know when we meet at RLC in the next four or five months how the conversations have gone since the event happened.”