McDonald’s suffers global tech outage, rules out cybersecurity incident

TOKYO – McDonald’s said on Friday a technology outage had disrupted operations at many of its outlets worldwide, including Japan and Australia, but ruled out the possibility of a cybersecurity incident.

Many McDonald’s stores in Japan stopped taking in-person and mobile customer orders because of the system disruption, a spokesperson at McDonald’s Holdings Company Japan said, adding that the company was working to restore operations soon.

“We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved,” McDonald’s said in a statement.

McDonald’s Australia said some of its restaurants were back online serving customers after the outage and were working to restore the remaining stores.

The fast food chain has about 40,000 restaurants worldwide, with more than 14,000 stores in the United States. It operates nearly 3,000 stores across Japan and roughly 1,000 in Australia, its websites for the regions show.

The outage seemed to be have affected customers in Hong Kong, New Zealand and the UK as well, with people taking to social media to complain about disruptions at stores.

The New York Times said McDonald’s Hong Kong was experiencing a “computer system failure”, stating that the mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks were not functioning.

Earlier this month, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram also faced technical issues that disrupted global services for hundreds of thousands of users for more than two hours. — Reuters