Grubhub Campus Dining at Boston University has suffered technical issues throughout the Spring semester, including an outage last week.
A Grubhub spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement that some students may experience outages, but the company remains committed to creating a positive user experience on the app.
“Those using our Campus Dining mobile application may have experienced an interruption last week,” the spokesperson wrote, “but our technical team quickly resolved the situation and restored all capabilities.”
College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Georgia Dray said the app glitched for her March 8 when trying to order food from Basho Express at Warren Towers.
“It would lead to a blank screen when you pull it up,” she said. “It was having a hard time finding a location or something.”
Students discussed the outage on Reddit, and Dray said users continued to comment on the issue for about four hours. She said only the on-campus section of the app was affected.
“Once I went into the off-campus section, I could buy things fine, it worked perfectly,” she said. “I think it was definitely a BU-side issue because Grubhub worked perfectly otherwise.”
BU’s Information Services and Technology did not respond to requests for comment.
CAS freshman Jake McCool said he has experienced situations when he could add items from on-campus restaurants into his cart, but could not complete the purchase.
“When you click ‘checkout,’ it’ll continue saying ‘verifying’ and the wheel will be spinning and then it won’t stop doing that,” he said, “and eventually it’ll say ‘error, didn’t work.’”
He noted there were additional instances last month when no restaurants would appear on the app’s Campus Dining section, and the app would only work intermittently.
“It was working for a little bit, and then stopped working again,” he said. “It was on the fritz, it wasn’t reliably working.”
He said he was at the George Sherman Union doing homework at the time and felt employees did “a really good job” of handling the issue by noticing the problem and responding quickly.
“Some of the GSU employees went out in front of each station and were taking people’s orders,” he said, “and writing them down on a Post-it Note and then relaying them to the restaurants.”
Camilla Atalla, a freshman in the College of Communication, said she had a similar issue trying to order on the app at the beginning of the semester.
“Grubhub wasn’t working,” she said. “I thought it was just a problem on my end, and I kept closing the app and opening it again, hoping it would change.”
Atalla said she texted her friends about the issue at the time, who replied saying they also couldn’t access the app.
“Everyone noticed immediately when Grubhub wasn’t working because everyone’s trying to get food and that’s the only way,” Atalla said. “Everyone is kind of like ‘What do I do? I don’t want to go to the dining hall.’”
After about 30 minutes, the app was working again, she said, but many students’ dependency on Grubhub makes any outage, regardless of duration, a problem.
“Everyone relies on Grubhub to eat, pretty much,” Atalla said. “It’s the only way that you can eat without spending extra money, besides going to the dining hall.”
