Malfunction leaves Target stores offline briefly Tuesday afternoon

Sep 24, 2019 10:23 PM EDT

ABC Columbia Staff,

According to the tracking system, Downdetctor.com Target’s checkout registers, website and mobile app went offline for a short period Tuesday afternoon.

This is the third time in as many months that a technical glitch left shoppers unable to purchase anything from the chain.

The outage lasted about an hour and according to Targets corporate office, didn’t cause as much disruption to shopping like the previous shutdown that happened June 15th leaving customers in unable to complete any transactions for about 2 hours.

“As the result of a payment processing issue, some Target guests were temporarily unable to make purchases at Target stores and at Target.com,” the company said in a statement. “Within an hour, our technology teams identified and began to remedy the issue to limit the impact on our guests.”

Target said the difficulty was not related to the security of its systems, but did not offer details as to what caused the issue. Target has since apologized to all customers that were inconvenienced.

The websiteDowndetector.com, which keepsnan eye on reports of orporate system outages via Twitter reports of showed more than 1000 tweets about the outages Tuesday afternoon. Officials say the site went down just before 4PM, but was back up and running around 5PM.