McDonald's suffers global tech outage, shutting some restaurants for hours

 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 12 a.m. 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 statement added.

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 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.

Media outlets reported that customers from Australia to the U.K. complained of issues with ordering, including a customer who posted a photo to X that saying a kiosk was unavailable.

”All McDonald’s restaurants are connected to a global network and that is what’s messed up,” Patrik Hjelte, owner of several McDonald’s restaurants in central Sweden, near the Norwegian border, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidning.

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 self-serve kiosks.

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.

At another location in Thailand’s capital, there was plywood over a door with a sign saying, “Technicians are updating the system," even as customers were ordering again and paying digitally.

Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a spike in outages in the U.S. starting at around 6:30 a.m. Friday, with most of the problems related to use of the McDonald's app. A map on Downdetector showed outages reported in New York, Chicago, South Florida, Dallas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Seattle among other regions of the country.

"You are currently experiencing connectivity issues, some features in the app may not work as expected," a message on the app in the U.S. said as of 5:45 a.m.

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

A worker at a Milan restaurant noted that the system was offline for a couple of hours and a technician walked them through getting it back up and running.

A spokesperson for McDonald's in Denmark said the “technology failure” was resolved there and its restaurants were open.