McDonald’s tech outage affects locations worldwide

McDonald’s customers around the world were unable to get their Big Macs or Egg McMuffins on Friday morning because of computer issues.

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The company called it a “technology outage,” The Associated Press reported.

Statement released

Update 2:45 p.m. EDT March 15: McDonald’s released a statement saying that “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 said it started at midnight CDT and was almost fully resolved about 12 hours later, the AP reported.

McDonald’s had moved its technology services to Google Cloud from the fast-food giant’s own servers. The change was to speed up kiosk orders and to help with staffing. The outage Friday was not caused by the move to the cloud, McDonald’s said, according to the AP.

Original report: Some restaurants had to be closed for hours as the systems were brought back online. The company said it wasn’t a cyberattack but didn’t elaborate on what actually happened.

“We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved,” McDonald’s told the AP in a statement. “We thank customers for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Restaurants in the U.S., Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and the U.K. were affected, CNN reported.

The company’s Japanese division said on social media that “operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide” while Hong Kong’s division called it a “computer system failure” that affected orders online and through self-serve kiosks.

There were also issues with the company’s app, according to Downdetector.

In Bangkok, the computer systems were down for an hour, but the outage only affected online and credit card orders. Cash orders could still be processed.

In New York, the system went down about 1 a.m. and was back around 5 a.m., CNN reported.

McDonald’s operates more than 41,800 restaurants worldwide. The biggest market is the U.S., with 13,500 locations, CNN reported.

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