McDonald’s said on Friday a technology outage had disrupted operations at many of its outlets worldwide, including in Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia, but it ruled out the possibility of a cybersecurity incident.
Many McDonald’s restaurants 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.
Some McDonald’s restaurants were operating normally again after the outage, with people ordering and getting their food at locations in Bangkok, Milan and London.
The company said its outlets in the U.K. and Ireland were fully back online after the outage, while McDonald’s Australia said most of its restaurants had reopened.
The fast-food chain has about 40,000 restaurants worldwide, with more than 14,000 outlets in the United States and more than 1,400 in Canada. It operates nearly 3,000 restaurants across Japan and roughly 1,000 in Australia, its websites for the regions show.
“We are aware of a technology outage which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved,” Kristen Hunter, a spokesperson for McDonald’s Canada, said in a statement to CBC News. “We thank customers for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Notably, the issue is not related to a cybersecurity event.”
It was not immediately clear how many restaurants were impacted globally by the technology outage. McDonald’s did not respond to a request for comment.
The outage seemed to have affected customers in Hong Kong and New Zealand as well, with people taking to social media to complain about disruptions at restaurants.
Earlier, 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 mobile ordering and that self-ordering kiosks were not functioning.
Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a spike in problems with the McDonald’s app in the last few hours.
“All McDonald’s restaurants are connected to a global network and that is what’s messed up,” Patrik Hjelte, owner of several McDonald’s restaurants in central Sweden, near the Norwegian border, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidning. “Right now we are restarting all systems and we hope to be up and running again as usual soon.”
