McDonald’s suffered a global technology outage on Friday, with restaurant kiosks and card payments being affected.
The Chicago-based company apologized for the disruption, saying it was due to a third-party technology provider, and not due to a cyber attack.
The outage started at 12 a.m. CDT and lasted for 12 hours.
“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 burger giant said the outage was not a problem caused by moving its servers to the cloud. McDonald’s announced in December a partnership with Google to move its technology to Google’s cloud servers. The move could help with ordering speed and staffing optimization for managers.
Earlier on 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.
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.
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.
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 restaurants were open.
Media outlets reported that customers from Australia to the UK had complained of issues with ordering, including a customer in Australia who posted a photo on X saying a kiosk was unavailable.
McDonald’s had exceptional, double-digit growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is now expecting a return to historic normals for 2024.
Its revenue rose 8 percent to $6.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
