McDonald’s apologizes for global IT outage

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

The company said the outage was caused by a third-party technology provider and was not a cybersecurity issue. It started around 1 a.m. Eastern time during a configuration change and was close to being resolved about 12 hours later, the Chicagobased 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. “We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”

The company said the outage also wasn’t related to its shift to Google Cloud as a technology provider. In December, McDonald’s announced a multiyear partnership with Google that will move restaurant computations from servers into the cloud. The partnership is designed to speed 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 posted on Facebook that a “computer system failure” knocked out online and self-serve kiosk orders. 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 at locations in Bangkok, Milan and London.