Report: Walgreens pharmacy system goes down

An ongoing computer glitch has been wreaking major havoc at Walgreens. According to the Chicago Tribune, the Deerfield, Illinois-based drugstore giant was gradually restoring its automated pharmacy system this week after a massive outage on Sept. 22.



Pharmacists at all 8,200 U.S. Walgreens stores had to start manually filling prescriptions on Tuesday morning after the glitch occurred following overnight maintenance. As of the afternoon of Sept. 24, thousands of stores still lacked access to Walgreens’ central pharmacy database.



This required stores to manually retrieve prescriptions they had on file, or even more time-consuming, manually contact other stores to obtain prescription information not available on site.



"We have been experiencing technical issues with our pharmacy systems," Walgreens spokesperson Jim Cohn told the Tribune. "Our pharmacies are still able to fill prescriptions and process most insurance claims, however some patients may experience longer wait times until certain functionalities are fully restored."