Toys R Us Computer Glitch Charges Customers Double

It was a Black Friday indeed for Toys R Us customers who discovered that they were charged double for their purchases due to a computer glitch.

Now customers have to straighten out the charges with Toys R Us as well as their banks to address the issue and the potential overdraft fees.

While Toys R Us did admit that the computer glitch happened at several stores, it didn't give the number of consumers that were affected. However, setting up a hotline gives me a pretty good indication that this isn't a one-off incident.

Where the IT infrastructure went awry is still not clear though I suspect the architects and developers are working harder than Santa's elves right now to fix the issue.

I empathize with them and wonder, like their customers, if this issue could have been avoided altogether. Was it an oversight in the software code or the inability to scale to meet the demands of the busiest shopping day of the year? Along those lines, it may have been the unanticipated backlash from a highly successful social media campaign. In case you missed it, Toys R Us is currently the fastest growing brand on Facebook with 400,000 fans. The company's aggressive Black Friday marketing campaign gave a sneak peek of Black Friday deals only to its fans. While the campaign was successful at driving customers to the stores, it is IT that will bring them back.

From the outside looking in, the company made smart technology choices and aligned with top vendors. Whether they have a service oriented architecture, cloud strategy or other best practices in place is unknown to me and now is certainly not the time for I told you so. However, you can guess that an IT audit wouldn't be an unreasonable request once the dust settles. Of course, I'd question the governance that's in place to prevent these types of glitches but that's only one piece of the puzzle.

I'm sure this will all be fixed by the time you read this though I still believe that an ounce of governance prevention is worth a pound of cure.