McDonald’s has faced systems failures in several countries, causing some of its restaurants to be closed for hours, but the company has ruled out cybersecurity issues as a possible cause of the problem.
The US fast-food chain said the “technology failure” on Friday affected operations at locations around the world, including Australia, Japan and the UK.
McDonald’s in Japan wrote on X:
“Operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide. The incident is a system failure”.
Patrik Hjelte, who owns several McDonald’s restaurants in central Sweden, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidningen that all of the chain’s “restaurants are connected to a global network, and that’s what caused the outage”. It was not immediately clear how many shops were affected globally.
Downdetector, a website tracking the outage, reported a spike in problems with the McDonald’s app, and media outlets reported that customers from Australia to the UK complained of ordering problems.
In February, the company said it missed its quarterly sales target for the first time in nearly four years, citing Israel’s war with the Gaza Strip as a factor. The drop came after customers in Muslim-majority countries called for a boycott of the chain in response to its Israeli franchisee donating thousands of free meals to the Israeli military.
Earlier this month, Facebook and Instagram, owned by Meta, also experienced technical problems that disrupted global services for hundreds of thousands of users for more than two hours.
The fast-food chain has about 40,000 restaurants worldwide, including more than 14,000 restaurants in the US.
