McDonald’s International Outage Caused By Third Party

Fast food chain McDonald’s has said a widespread outage affecting thousands of its stores in multiple countries on Friday, including the UK, was caused by a third-party technology provider.

The issue began at around 5 a.m. GMT during a configuration change, the Chicago-based company said, adding that it was mostly resolved about 12 hours later.

“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,” said the firm’s global chief information officer Brian Rice 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 apologise for any inconvenience this has caused,” the statement added.

Configuration change

“Notably, this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event – rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change,” Rice said.

The company said the issue was not related to a multi-year deal with Google Cloud, announced in December, that will see restaurant compute tasks such as kiosk ordering and staff management moved from local servers to the cloud.

McDonald’s also reiterated that the problem was not due to a cyberattack.

The outage caused McDonald’s stores to stop taking orders in the UK, other European countries, Australia, Japan and other regions.

The company’s Hong Kong unit said orders had been disabled by a “computer system failure”, while a staff member at a Bangkok location said the system was down for about an hour.

DownDetector also reported issues with the company’s mobile ordering app.

Cash payments

Some restaurants accepted cash payments, while others shut down temporarily.

Customer Ted Anderson wrote on X that he had gone into a location in Japan and found staff taking cash payments and “calculating the totals on paper”.

McDonald’s said all its Australia locations had re-opened by 2:15 p.m. GMT.