London, England – McDonald’s restaurants worldwide faced a major system failure on Friday, causing closures and disruptions in online and app orders across various countries including the United States, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.
According to global chief information officer Brian Rice, the fast-food giant experienced a global technology system outage at around 1 a.m. ET, but the issue was quickly identified and corrected. Rice assured that many markets were back online or in the process of coming back online, emphasizing that the problem was not due to a cybersecurity breach but rather a third-party provider during a configuration change.
Reports of the system outage came from different regions, with a cashier at a McDonald’s store in New York confirming that their IT system went down at 1 a.m. and came back online around 5 a.m. Meanwhile, McDonald’s Japan indicated that many stores across the country had temporarily suspended operations.
In the UK, a McDonald’s employee in London mentioned a system outage between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time, leading staff to take orders in person and communicate with kitchen colleagues orally. Similarly, McDonald’s Australia reported that its restaurants nationwide were impacted by the outage.
Issues were also noted in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with McDonald’s Hong Kong informing customers on Facebook about a computer system failure affecting mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks. The fast food chain’s McDelivery service in Taiwan announced temporary suspension of online and telephone ordering services due to maintenance.
With over 41,800 stores worldwide, McDonald’s largest market being the United States with nearly 13,500 restaurants, the outage presents another challenge for the company following a difficult start to the year. During a recent earnings presentation, McDonald’s CEO Christopher Kempczinski expressed concerns over the impact of conflicts in the Middle East on the business, as well as negative sales trends in Muslim countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.