Wal-Mart May Pursue Case Against Xerox Over Food Benefit System Outage Losses

The Supreme Court has reinstated Wal-Mart’s lawsuit against Xerox over $4 million in denied reimbursements for food purchases made during a prolonged outage of the electronic benefit transfer system. Justices last week reversed a trial court’s take-nothing judgment that was upheld in 2020 by the Fifth Court of Appeals.

On a Saturday in October 2013 Xerox’s system authorizing purchases by federal food program beneficiaries went offline for more than 10 hours when Xerox suffered a power failure while performing planned maintenance at its Dallas data center. Wal-Mart stored 420,000 transactions and later presented them for processing. Xerox declined reimbursement for about 86,000 transactions, worth around $4 million.