McDonald's stores suffered a global IT failure

London/Hong Kong/New York
CNN
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McDonald's suffered a system outage on Friday that closed restaurants and disrupted online orders and apps around the world, including in the United States, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.

At approximately 1 a.m. ET McDonald's (MCD“We experienced an outage in our global technology system, which was quickly identified and corrected,” Brian Rice, global chief information officer, said in a statement posted on the company’s website.

“Many markets have come back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online,” he said. “This issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; Rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change.

previously, A cashier at a McDonald's store in New York told CNN that the store's IT system went down around 1 a.m. and came back around 5 a.m.

Meanwhile, McDonald's Japan said in a post on Friday

In the United Kingdom, Maria Avram, who works at McDonald's In London, he told CNN that there was a system outage between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time (2 a.m. and 3 a.m. ET), and employees had to take orders in person and tell their colleagues in the kitchen what to cook.

A McDonald's Australia spokesperson told CNN that its restaurants across the country were affected by the outage.

Problems have also been reported in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

McDonald's Hong Kong said on Facebook: “Due to a computer system failure, the mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks are not working. Please order directly from the restaurant counter.” It later said that these services have now been restored.

“The system is under maintenance, and online and phone ordering services have also been temporarily suspended,” the Taiwan fast food chain's McDelivery service said on its website.

McDonald's Taiwan said on Friday that some of its restaurants, as well as McDelivery, were temporarily unable to conduct transactions due to an internet outage, Taiwan's TVBS reported. TVBS said McDonald's has assured its customers that it is investigating the situation and making the necessary repairs.

McDonald's has it More than 41,800 stores Worldwide, with approximately 13,500 in the United States, its largest market.

Among other countries known to be affected, Japan has the largest number of McDonald's restaurants – nearly 3,000 – followed by the UK, with nearly 1,500 stores, and Australia, with just over 1,000 stores.

The outage adds to a shaky start to the year for McDonald's. During its latest earnings presentation last month, the company said the war in the Middle East was hurting its business and would likely continue to do so. Like other American brands, it has been subject to a boycott in many markets in the region.

CEO Christopher Kempczinski said McDonald's is also seeing some negative impact on sales in other Muslim countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

This story has been updated with additional information.