McDonald’s restaurants around the world were forced to temporarily close on Friday due to a massive technological issue that went global and made it so that customers could not pay for their food.
McDonald’s Close Amidst Massive System Failure
“We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved,” a spokesperson for Chicago-based McDonald’s Corps told New York Daily 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,” the spokesperson added, not going into any further details.
As the closures continued to spread, Global chief information officer Brian Rice issued an apology on the behalf of McDonald’s
“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,” Rice said, according to Yahoo News.
“What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it,” he continued. “Thank you for your patience, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”
McDonald’s Franchises Speak Out
Patrik Hjelte, the owner of several McDonald’s restaurants in central Sweden, explained that “all McDonald’s restaurants are connected to a global network,” which is probably why franchises all over the world have been impacted. A McDonald’s worker in New Zealand said that the IT issue made it so that they couldn’t take any orders or serve any food, with the screens typically used to take orders not working.
Newsweek reported that the McDonald’s IT issues have been reported in Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, and the U.S.
“The McDonalds outage is crazy,” one New Zealand-based McDonald’s customer wrote on social media. “Went in tonight and drive thru + all kiosks were down. A system that can fail nation wide is bad but across multiple countries too!? Bonkers.”
An employee at a McDonald’s in New York told CNN that the store’s IT system went down at around 1 a.m. and came back around 5 a.m.
“Due to a computer system failure, the mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks are not functio ning. Please order directly at the restaurant counter,” McDonald’s Hong Kong said in a statement, later adding that service had returned.
McDonald’s Taiwan issued a similar statement, saying, “The system is under maintenance, and online and telephone ordering services are temporarily suspended.”
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Tough Time For McDonald’s
There are around 41,800 McDonald’s restaurants around the world, with nearly 13,500 in the United States alone. This comes at a difficult time for McDonald’s, as the company revealed at its earnings presentation last month that the war in the Middle East was hurting its business and would likely continue to do so, as the brand had been hit with boycotts in several markets in the region.
This also comes after Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram faced technical issues earlier this month that disrupted global services for hundreds of thousands of users for more than two hours, according to Reuters. It still remains unclear as to why exactly this technical issue took place.
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