McDonald's Global Outage Leaves Customers Hungry For Answers

Popular food restaurant chain McDonald's has been hit with a massive global IT failure. This failure caused several of their restaurants to close and disrupted online orders.

However, as of now, some of the stores are reportedly back online after the shocking tech disturbance.

A statement on the company's website issued by global chief information officer Brian Rice at around 1 a.m. ET McDonald’s “experienced a global technology system outage, which was quickly identified and corrected."

"Many markets are back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online,” Rice added. “This issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change.”

According to a CNN report, a cashier at one of the outlets in New York revealed that the store's system went down around 1 a.m. and came back on by 5 a.m.

On the other hand, McDonald's Japan shared on X (formerly Twitter) that "Many stores across the country have temporarily suspended operations.

The Hong Kong branch shared on Facebook: Due to a computer system failure, the mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks are not functioning. Please order directly at the restaurant counter." It later revealed that the services had been restored.

The Taiwan branch also stated on its website that "The system is under maintenance, and online and telephone ordering services are temporarily suspended."

Per a Reuters report, a McDonald's Holdings Company Japan spokeswoman stated that recovery efforts are underway. Following the interruption, McDonald's reported that all of its locations in the UK and Ireland were back online.

Earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of users experienced service disruptions on Facebook and Instagram, both owned by Meta, due to technical problems.

Many users flocked to Facebook, Instagram, and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, in order to voice their dissatisfaction and their frustration over the outage.

"We've received news that the Mcdonald's IT outage is caused by Russian hackers in revenge for the fast food chain pulling out of their country in 2022," one user joked on X. "They have finally used up their reserves of Big Mac sauce, and they are holding the company ransom for 1000 litres of the valuable condiment."

A reason for the outage has yet to be revealed.

Over on Reddit, a user reported the outage on a Technology sub-Reddit, prompting one netizen to wonder why they didn’t just use pen and paper. “The Achilles heel of modern living finally wakes people up when they get their Big Macs. Pencil and paper still work. Just wait until the day after tomorrow. What are they going to do then? No more happy meals,” one user wrote.

However, another user, a German fast food worker, was quick to offer a rebuttal. “Worker in Germany here. We're having issues too but have had worse in the past including a totally down system in December. We ended up having to do things manually which included writing orders on paper and only accepting cash," they wrote.

"The issue is, especially with only one cash register, is that taking orders manually takes far too long. Modern fast-food restaurants are designed to serve as many people as possible as fast as possible. That's why we have the apps and the ordering monitors," they continued. "We literally cannot serve the normal amount of customers manually. McDonald's is too big and too popular. If the system crashes, then the whole restaurant crashes, even with manual backup, we just can't provide the service customers expect."

According to Down Detector, 64% of individuals have reported a problem with the app, 27% have reported an issue with check-out, and 9% have reported an issue with the McDonald’s website.