McDonald’s apologizes for system outage that shut down some stores

LONDON — McDonald’s apologized Friday for a global technology outage that shuttered some restaurants for hours, including outlets in Canada.

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

“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 apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.”

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 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 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 self-serve kiosks.

Downdetector, an outage tracker, 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.

A worker at a restaurant in Bangkok said the system was down for about an hour, making it impossible to take online or credit card payments but allowing it to still accept cash for orders.

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