McDonald's suffers global tech outage, rules out cybersecurity incident

McDonald's said on Friday a technology outage had disrupted operations at many of its outlets worldwide, including Japan, UK and Australia, but ruled out the possibility of a cybersecurity incident.
 

Many McDonald's stores in Japan stopped taking in-person and mobile customer orders because of the system disruption, a spokesperson at McDonald's Holdings Company Japan said, adding that it was working to restore operations soon.
 

"We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved," McDonald's said in a statement.


 

The company said its outlets in the UK and Ireland were fully back online after the outage, while McDonald's Australia said most of its restaurants had reopened.
 

The fast food chain has about 40,000 restaurants worldwide, with more than 14,000 stores in the United States. It operates nearly 3,000 stores across Japan and roughly 1,000 in Australia, its websites for the regions show.
 

It was not immediately clear how many stores were impacted globally by the technology outage. McDonald's did not respond to a request for comment on the same.
 

The outage seemed to be have affected customers in Hong Kong and New Zealand as well, with people taking to social media to complain about disruptions at stores.
 

The New York Times said McDonald's Hong Kong was experiencing a "computer system failure", and that the mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks were not functioning.


 

Earlier this month, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram also faced technical issues that disrupted global services for hundreds of thousands of users for more than two hours.

Meanwhile, later in the day, McDonald's apologised for the global technology outage.

The company said the outage was caused by a third-party technology provider and was not a cybersecurity issue. It started around 12 a.m. CDT during a configuration change and was close to being resolved about 12 hours later, the Chicago-based company said.

"Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages. I understand that this impacts you, your restaurant teams and our customers," Brian Rice, the company's global chief information officer, said in a statement.

"What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it. Thank you for your patience, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused," the statement added.

The company said the outage also wasn't related to its shift to Google Cloud as a technology provider. In December, McDonald's announced a multi-year partnership with Google that will move restaurant computations from servers into the cloud. The partnership is designed to speed up tasks like ordering at kiosks and to help managers optimize staffing.

(With inputs from PTI)