Panera Bread agrees to pay $2.5 million in data breach class action lawsuit

Panera's IT system was breached last March. Panera Bread

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Panera Bread has agreed to pay $2.5 million in a class action lawsuit filed last June by current and former employees affected by a March 2024 cybersecurity breach affecting the company’s online ordering, POS systems, and in-store kiosks.

According to the lawsuit, the data breach resulted in the private information of 147,321 people being compromised, including Social Security numbers. The lawsuit members claim that the company, “failed to adequately train its employees on cybersecurity and failed to maintain reasonable security safeguards or protocols to protect [its employees].”

 The settlement, which received preliminary approval by U.S. District Judge Henry Edward Autrey last month, covers all U.S. residents who were sent notices by Panera after the incident occurred last year, including mainly former and current employees, but also some customers.

Affected individuals are eligible for reimbursement of up to $500 for ordinary out of pocket expenses (like a credit monitoring report), or up to $6,500 if the individual suffered a greater financial loss like identity theft. People interested in joining the lawsuit class must submit a valid claim ticket by Nov. 11 to be included in the payout.

At the time of the IT outage in March 2024, complaints were circulating on social media about Panera’s lack of transparency around the cause of the service interruption, with many speculating at the time that it was caused by an external attack. 

Panera declined to comment on the lawsuit settlement.

Contact Joanna at [email protected]

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