Technology

DoorDash glitch allowed customers to order food without paying

The delivery company said it quickly fixed the issue and was compensating restaurants for fraudulent transactions.
DoorDash app
Photograph: Shutterstock

A problem with DoorDash’s payment system allowed customers to order food without paying for it on Thursday night.

Users were able to check out without an authorized form of payment “for a short period of time,” the company said in an email. Some posted on social media about using fake or expired cards to order food, while others lamented having missed the opportunity.

DoorDash said it “immediately corrected the issue” and was working to cancel fraudulent orders. It also said it would compensate restaurants for unauthorized orders. 

The company did not say how many “free” transactions occurred while the system was on the fritz, nor would it confirm whether customers who checked out without paying would be retroactively charged.

It’s the latest hiccup for restaurant ordering systems in recent months. A tech outage at Starbucks last month snarled some locations’ digital orders for days, the Wall Street Journal reported. DoorDash went down for several hours in May. And Grubhub briefly crashed during a free lunch promotion in New York that led to overwhelming demand. As more restaurant transactions shift to digital channels, outages like these have become more of a problem.

“We work to ensure that we are always offering the highest quality of service to the communities we serve, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused by this,” DoorDash said Friday.

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