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.
âReliability 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,â Brian Rice, the company's global chief information officer, said in a statement.
âWhat 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.
Get Tri-state area news delivered to your inbox. Sign up for NBC New York's News Headlines newsletter.
âAll McDonaldâs restaurants are connected to a global network and that is whatâs messed up,â Patrik Hjelte, owner of several McDonaldâs restaurants in central Sweden, near the Norwegian border, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidning.
U.S. & World
Earlier Friday, McDonald's in Japan posted on X, formerly Twitter, that âoperations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide," calling it âa system failure.â In Hong Kong, the chain said on Facebook that a âcomputer system failureâ 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 Thailandâs capital, there was plywood over a door with a sign saying, âTechnicians 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 McDonaldâs 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 âtechnology failureâ was resolved there and its restaurants were open.