McWhoops! Burger giant bitten by global tech bug

Meals were less than happy at McDonald’s Friday morning thanks to a system failure that forced stores around the world to close.

“McDonald’s experienced a global technology system outage, which was quickly identified and corrected,” Global Chief Information Officer Brian Rice said in a statement on the company’s website. “Many markets are back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online.”

The fast-food giant emphasized the issue was “not directly caused by a cybersecurity event,” but instead a “a third-party provider during a configuration change.” It did not provide further details.

Patrik Hjelte, the owner of several McDonald’s restaurants in central Sweden, noted that “all McDonald’s restaurants are connected to a global network,” which is likely why the issues were so widespread.

Word of the malfunctioning McDonald’s stores began cropping up online in the early hours of Friday morning. McDonald’s in Japan took to X to announce that many stores nationwide had temporarily suspended operations due to a “system failure.”

In Hong Kong, the chain on Facebook blamed a “computer system failure” for knocking out orders online and through selfserve kiosks.

According to Downdetector. com, an outlet dedicated to providing real-time information about the status of various websites and services, the McDonald’s app and its online ordering system were also impacted by the tech issues. Users started reporting problems with the app around 2 a.m. ET, with complaints spiking just before 9 a.m. Since then, many McDonald’s restaurants have said they’ve resolved their problems, and are operating normally again — including in Bangkok, Milan, London and Los Angeles. A cashier working at a New York location told CNN that the store’s IT system went down around 1 a.m. and did not come back until hours later, around 5 a.m. With News Wire Services