McDonald's blames global outages on third party

McDonald's has revealed that the technical problems that brought much of its fast food chain to a standstill on Friday were caused by a third-party provider.

The international restaurant said the global outage occurred during a “configuration change” and stopped stores from taking orders in the UK, Australia and Japan – among other countries.

McDonald's stressed that the problem was not caused by a cyber attack.

Stores in the UK and Australia are open again after freezing their systems.

People in Japan are also reportedly resuming trade after being forced into a lockdown.

Brian Rice, McDonald's chief information officer, said the company experienced “an outage in its global technology system, which was quickly identified and corrected.”

He said that many countries are now operating normally while the rest are working to return to the Internet.

“It is worth noting that this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event – ​​it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change,” he added.

Rice said that what happened was “an exception to the rule, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it.”

The problems began in the early hours of the morning and continued throughout the morning, but the company did not mention the number of affected stores.

Sarah McLean, who owns a franchise in the Midlands, said all 21 of her branches were affected.

She told the BBC: “My restaurants were affected very early in the morning, and fortunately the impact was not very significant, for about an hour and a half.” But during that period, “they could not serve anyone.”

Downdetector, a system used to monitor IT issues in companies, noticed a spike in issues with the McDonald's app in the UK from around 05:00 GMT on Friday.

Some social media users posted their displeasure.

“@McDonaldsUK why can I order through the app this morning but all my local McDonald's are closed when they are supposed to be open 24 hours?!” Tom Bennison in the East Midlands Posted by Xformerly Twitter.

Andrew Evans in Birmingham to publish: “Hmmmm @McDonaldsUK my local is rejecting everyone saying there is a national outage in your ordering system?”

Problems have been reported in several countries, including New Zealand, Austria and Germany, but this afternoon they began to be resolved.

Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that stores across Japan began resuming operations after the system crash.

McDonald's in Japan had previously said: “There is currently a system failure. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and ask that you wait for a while until service is restored.”

Posting on XTed Anderson said he went to a restaurant in Japan to find it was cash only, and the staff “counting the totals on paper.”

By 14:15 GMT, McDonald's Australia said all its restaurants had reopened.

“Thank you so much again to our wonderful customers and hardworking staff for your patience and support,” she said.

In New Zealand, user X said Jermaine van Rooyen: “McDonald's outage is crazy. Went tonight and drove through the place + all the kiosks were down. A system that can fail nationwide is bad but across multiple countries too!? Crazy.”

The fast food chain has around 40,000 restaurants worldwide, with around 1,450 restaurants across the UK and Ireland and more than 14,000 stores in the US.

It operates nearly 3,000 across Japan and about 1,000 in Australia.

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