The McDonald's Tech Issues That Are Causing Global Ordering Mishaps
McDonald's issued an apology for a global technology outage that occurred around midnight CDT on Friday, March 15, which forced some of its restaurants around the world to close for several hours, as well as causing global ordering complications. Japan announced on "X" that it was temporarily suspending operations across the country. McDonald's Hong Kong announced on Facebook that the mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks at McDonald's were not working. McDonald's McDelivery service in Taiwan also announced on its website that online and telephone ordering services were being temporarily suspended.
Australia and the U.K. (which has an exclusive McDonald's app deal) were reported on Downdetector to be experiencing problems with the McDonald's app (an app that knows way more about you than you think). Downdetector is a website that claims to "tell you when your favorite services are down or having problems" in real time. The site also showed a map highlighting multiple U.S. cities that were experiencing outages at McDonald's, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
The fast-food chain giant, which was reported to have about 40,300 restaurants worldwide as recently as 2022, released a statement in which its Global Chief Information Officer Brian Rice reassured McDonald's global employees. Rice stated, "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."
McDonald's says that its system outage was not the result of a cybersecurity issue
The global tech outage failure may raise concerns about McDonald's cybersecurity. However, Brian Rice also said in the statement that the system-wide failure is unrelated to cybersecurity. Rice explained, "This issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change."
Although the global outage inconvenienced McDonald's employees and customers around the world for several hours, the tech issue was eventually resolved in some locations. An employee who works at a McDonald's location in Milan said that a technician repaired the store's system after it was down for a few hours. A McDonald's spokesperson for the fast-food chain's restaurants in Denmark also announced that the tech issues were fixed in Denmark and that the country's restaurants were fully operational.
McDonald's is making continued efforts to restore its systems, including its app (which has terms and conditions ruffling some feathers online). Rice added, "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."