LONDON (AP) — McDonald's apologized Friday for a global technology outage that caused some restaurants to close for several hours.
The company said the outage was caused by a third-party technology provider and was not a cybersecurity issue. The Chicago-based company said the issue began around 12 a.m. Pacific time during the configuration change and was close to being resolved about 12 hours later.
“The reliability and stability of our technology is a top priority, and I understand how frustrating it can be when failures occur. This impacts you, your restaurant teams, and our customers. We understand giving,” Brian Rice, the company's global chief information officer, said in a statement.
“What happened today is an exception to the norm and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause,” the statement read. added.
The company also said the outage is not related to its transition to Google Cloud as its technology provider. In December, McDonald's announced a multi-year partnership with Google to move restaurant calculations from servers to the cloud. The partnership is designed to speed up tasks like kiosk ordering and help managers optimize staffing.
early Friday morning, McDonald's in Japan posted X (formerly Twitter) reported that “many stores nationwide have temporarily suspended operations” due to a “system failure.” In Hong Kong, the chain said on Facebook that a “computer system failure” meant it was unable to order online or at self-service kiosks.
Outage tracker Downdetector also reported a spike in issues with the McDonald's app over several hours.
Some McDonald's restaurants have resumed normal operations after the power outage, with people ordering and picking up meals at stores in Bangkok, Milan and London on Friday.
An employee at a Bangkok restaurant said the system was down for about an hour, making it impossible to take online or credit card payments, but they were still accepting cash orders.
Elsewhere in the Thai capital, a plywood board and a sign reading “Technicians are updating the system” are placed over doors, even as customers order again and pay digitally. was there.
Employees at a restaurant in Milan noticed their system had been offline for several hours, and a technician provided instructions on how to get it back up and running.
A spokesperson for McDonald's Denmark said the “technical glitch” had been resolved in Denmark and the restaurant was open for business.
Media outlets reported that customers traveling from Australia to the UK had complained about problems with their orders, including one Australian customer who posted a photo on X saying the kiosk was unavailable.
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AP writers Jintamas Saksonchai and David Cohen in Bangkok and Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark; Kelvin Chan in London. Colleen Barry of Milan; and Yuri Kageyama from Tokyo contributed.
