Starbucks, like many other coffee shop and restaurant chains, has its own mobile app and desktop site for placing orders and storing a gift card balance. The app and website are supposed to speed up the ordering process, and even give you rewards over time, but they're causing headaches for many people who have been unable to access their accounts for months. Even worse, some have a gift card balance that they are unable to use while the accounts are broken.

Many Starbucks customers are unable to access their existing accounts, usually with an error message like "A system error occurred, please try again later," with most of the reports coming in over the past few months. There are countless reports of the issue on social media sites like Reddit and X/Twitter, as well as many one-star reviews on the Google Play Store that describe the problem. The issue is also preventing some new customers from creating an account in the first place.

There's nothing stopping you from spending money at Starbucks without a functional account, but being locked out means you can't accumulate points for rewards. More importantly, anyone who had a gift card balance in their account are locked out from spending that money. One person on Reddit said, "I have like $150 in gift cards stuck on that account and have no way to access it."

There are a few workarounds that have solved the issue for some people. One Reddit comment said that changing your password to remove any percent symbols (%) through a password reset on the desktop website worked for them, and based on the rest of the comment thread, that worked for some other accounts as well. For others, a VPN was causing the login issue, and turning that off allowed the Starbucks app to work again.

We've reached out to Starbucks to ask if the company is aware of these problems, and if there is a solution in the works. This article will be updated with a response when (or if) we get it.