McDonald’s hit by tech outage in several countries around the world

McDonald’s apologized Friday for a technology outage had disrupted operations at many of its outlets worldwide, including in Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia.

The company said the outage was caused by a third-party technology provider and was not a cybersecurity issue. It started at about 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 said.

The company also said the outage 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 such as ordering at kiosks and to help managers optimize staffing.

Some restaurants operating normally again

Many McDonald’s restaurants in Japan stopped taking in-person and mobile customer orders because of the system disruption, according to a spokesperson at McDonald’s Holdings Company Japan.

Some McDonald’s restaurants were operating normally again after the outage, with people ordering and getting their food at locations in Bangkok, Milan and London.

The company said its outlets in the U.K. 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 outlets in the United States and more than 1,400 in Canada. It operates nearly 3,000 restaurants across Japan and roughly 1,000 in Australia, its websites for the regions show.

“We are aware of a technology outage which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved,” Kristen Hunter, a spokesperson for McDonald’s Canada, said in a statement to CBC News. “We thank customers for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Notably, the issue is not related to a cybersecurity event.”

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

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

Earlier, McDonald’s in Japan posted on X that “operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide,” calling it “a system failure.” In Hong Kong, the chain said on Facebook that a “computer system failure” knocked out mobile ordering and that self-ordering kiosks were not functioning.

Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a small spike in problems with the McDonald’s app, but that has since subsided.

“All McDonald’s restaurants are connected to a global network and that is what’s messed up,” Patrik Hjelte, owner of several McDonald’s restaurants in central Sweden, near the Norwegian border, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidning. “Right now we are restarting all systems and we hope to be up and running again as usual soon.”