What&#x27;s so striking about this is that entire retail chains can be shut down by a problem in some cloud server. Starbucks had a server outage in April which caused stores to close.[1]<p>There&#x27;s a trend towards &quot;hosted POS&quot;, where point of sale systems have to talk to the &quot;cloud&quot; to do anything, even handle cash. Until recently, most POS systems were running off a server in the manager&#x27;s office, which communicated to servers and credit card systems elsewhere.  A network outage didn&#x27;t affect cash transactions. Often, the systems could even process a credit card transaction without external help, giving up real-time validation but still logging the transaction for later processing.<p>There&#x27;s a single point of failure being designed into retail here.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;24&#x2F;starbucks-point-of-sale-cash-registers-down&#x2F;26338505&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usatoday.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2015&#x2F;04&#x2F;24&#x2F;starbucks-poin...</a>