McDonald’s has released a statement about the global outage that resulted in numerous franchise locations being temporarily shuttered.
Beginning in the early hours of Friday morning, McDonald’s stores, predominantly in Australia, were impacted by a widespread technical issue that made it impossible for customers to pay for their orders. Similar technical issues were also reported in countries like China, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, and Germany.
This situation forced the popular fast food chain to temporarily shutter some of its locations while the issues were resolved. In a prior statement to Newsweek, a spokesman for McDonald’s said that “notably, the issue is not related to a cybersecurity event.”
On Friday, after the situation had been resolved, McDonald’s released a statement on its official corporate website providing an update and some explanation about the nature of the issue that caused the global outage.
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“At approximately midnight CDT [Central Daylight Time] on Friday, McDonald’s experienced a global technology system outage, which was quickly identified and corrected,” the statement explained. “Many markets are back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online. We are closely working with those markets that are still experiencing issues. Notably, this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change.”
The company continued in its statement: “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. 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.”
Responding to an inquiry from Newsweek on Saturday, McDonald’s said that it could not provide more specific details on the nature of the technical issue at this time.
According to reports that emerged about the outage from Australia, while some locations were forced to close down entirely, others were able to keep operating while only taking cash payments.
In a post to its official X, formerly Twitter, account, McDonald’s Japan said there has been a “system failure,” and that the company apologized “for any inconvenience this may cause and ask that you please wait for a while until the service is restored.”
McDonald’s currently operates a little over 40,000 restaurants worldwide, including around 1,040 in Australia, 3,000 in Japan, 1,400 in Canada, 400 in South Korea, and 400 in Taiwan.
Update 03/16/24, 1:43 p.m. ET: This article was updated to include a response from McDonald’s.
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Jessica Roberts is a seasoned business writer who deciphers the intricacies of the corporate world. With a focus on finance and entrepreneurship, she provides readers with valuable insights into market trends, startup innovations, and economic developments.
