McDonald’s on system glitch: What happened today has been an exception to the norm

Technology News
Giant burger McDonald’s apologized for this for a global technology outage that shuttered several restaurants across the world for hours. In a statement the company said that the outage was not a cybersecurity issue and was caused by a third-party technology provider. It started around 12 am CDT during a configuration change and was close to being resolved about 12 hours later, the Chicago-based company said.
The massive IT outage impacted restaurants worldwide, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy, and New Zealand.
Denies cyber attack
“Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages. I understand that this impacts you, your restaurant teams and our customers,” Brian Rice, the company’s global chief information officer, said in a statement.
“What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it. Thank you for your patience, and we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused,” the statement added.
Outage caused during move to Google Cloud
The company said the outage also wasn’t related to its shift to Google Cloud as a technology provider. It added that the glitch was caused due to a configuration change. In December, McDonald’s announced a multi-year partnership with Google that will move restaurant computations from servers into the cloud. The partnership is designed to speed up tasks like ordering at kiosks and to help managers optimize staffing.
Earlier Friday, McDonald’s in Japan posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide,” calling it “a system failure.” In Hong Kong, the chain said on Facebook that a “computer system failure” knocked out orders online and through self-serve kiosks.
Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a spike in problems with the McDonald’s app over several hours.