McDonald’s apologizes for system outage

LONDON — McDonald's apologized Friday for a global technology outage that shuttered some restaurants for hours.

The issue, caused by a problem with the fastfood giant's computer system, rippled from Japan to Australia, New Zealand and several European countries on Friday, leaving some restaurants unable to take orders or serve food.

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

It started around 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.

The company 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 like ordering at kiosks and to help managers optimize staffing.

Earlier Friday, McDonald's in Japan posted on X, formerly Twitter, 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 orders online and through selfserve kiosks.

Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a spike in problems with the McDonald's app over several hours.

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

Media outlets reported that customers from Australia to the U.K. had complained of issues with ordering.