Panera Bread week-long IT outage caused by ransomware attack

BleepingComputer reports that Panera Bread suffered a week-long nationwide IT outage beginning March 22 caused by a ransomware attack that encrypted many virtual machines and disabled point-of-sale, phones, website, mobile apps and reward systems; the company restored some systems from backups, attribution is unknown and employees are concerned about potential data theft. The article also notes Omni Hotels experienced a separate, ransomware-related outage during the same period.