(qlmbusinessnews.com Mon 18th, 2024) London, UK —
McDonald's Pins Blame on Third Party for Widespread Outage.
McDonald's has attributed the technical meltdown that crippled operations across its global restaurant chain on Friday to a third-party provider.
The fast-food giant revealed that the worldwide outage occurred during a “configuration change” carried out by an external vendor, rendering stores in the UK, Australia, Japan, and numerous other nations unable to process orders.
While stressing that the disruption was not the result of a cyber attack, McDonald's acknowledged that the issue stemmed from a third party's actions.
In the UK and Australia, restaurants have reopened after their systems froze, while Japanese outlets are reportedly resuming trade after being forced to temporarily shut their doors.
“This was a global technology system outage, which was swiftly identified and rectified,” said Brian Rice, McDonald's Chief Information Officer. He added that while many countries were now operating normally, others were in the process of coming back online.
“Notably, this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event – rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change,” Rice elaborated.
Describing the incident as an “exception to the norm,” Rice assured that the company was “working with absolute urgency to resolve it.”
‘Unable to Serve Customers'
The problems began in the early hours of Friday morning and persisted throughout the day, though McDonald's declined to disclose the precise number of affected restaurants.
Sarah McLean, a franchise owner with 21 branches across the Midlands, revealed that all her outlets had been impacted. “My restaurants were affected very early in the morning, so thankfully the impact wasn't too significant, about an hour and a half,” she told reporters. “But during that time, they couldn't serve anyone.”
Downdetector, a service that monitors IT issues in businesses, noted a surge in reported problems with the McDonald's UK app from around 5 am GMT on Friday.
Disgruntled customers took to social media to voice their frustration, with some questioning why their local outlets were closed despite being advertised as 24-hour establishments.
While problems were reported across multiple countries, including New Zealand, Austria, and Germany, the situation began to stabilise by the afternoon.
Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that stores across Japan were gradually resuming operations following the system disruption, after McDonald's Japan had earlier acknowledged a “system failure” and apologised for the inconvenience.
In Australia, McDonald's confirmed that all of its restaurants had reopened by 2:15 pm GMT, thanking customers and staff for their patience.
A New Zealand customer, Germin van Royen, expressed astonishment at the outage's sweeping global impact, describing a “system that can fail nation-wide” across multiple countries as “bonkers.”
With around 40,000 restaurants worldwide, including approximately 1,450 in the UK and Ireland, over 14,000 in the United States, nearly 3,000 in Japan, and roughly 1,000 in Australia, the fast-food chain's reliance on streamlined technology systems is evident.
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