Adrian Johnson
TLDR:
- McDonald’s experienced a global tech outage leading to restaurant closures
- The outage was due to a “system failure” and not cybersecurity issues
Fast food giant McDonald’s faced a major global tech outage that resulted in the closure of some of its restaurants for several hours. The chain ruled out cybersecurity issues as the cause of the problem and attributed it to a “technology outage” affecting operations in countries such as Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The incident was described as a “system failure” by McDonald’s in Japan, with a local owner in Sweden noting that all restaurants are connected to a global network that was disrupted.
It was not clear how many stores were impacted globally, but reports indicated that customers from Australia to the UK faced issues with ordering. McDonald’s, which has over 40,000 restaurants worldwide, had recently missed its sales target for the first time in nearly four years, citing factors such as Israel’s war on Gaza. The chain had faced backlash in Muslim-majority countries due to its Israeli franchisee’s support for the Israeli military.
This tech outage comes in the wake of similar technical issues faced by Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, which disrupted global services for users for over two hours. McDonald’s assured customers that they were working to resolve the problems and restore normal operations as soon as possible.
