Mcdonald’s Global Outage Caused Major Disruptions Worldwide

McDonald’s restaurants across the globe experienced disruptions to service on Friday as the fast food giant’s systems went down in a global outage. Ordering kiosks, cash registers, and payment processing were all impacted in what McDonald’s called a “technology outage.”

Customers showed their frustration on social media about long lines and inability to order food. Employees also shared their struggles of having to take manual orders on paper and only accept cash payments. “Already been yelled at by 7 people, so I’m loving this global outage haha,” said one employee on Reddit.

What Caused The Mcdonald’s Global Outage?

While some speculated a potential cyberattack, McDonald’s was quick to deny this. In a statement, Chief Information Officer Brian Rice explained the root cause came from a “third-party provider during a configuration change.” However, he did not disclose which third party or details on the configuration error.

McDonald’s also provided updates to employees that work was underway to resolve the issues plaguing stores. By Saturday morning, many locations had payment processing and ordering abilities restored. Still, the global outage lingered in some markets into the weekend as technicians continued troubleshooting to fully bring all systems back up.

The fast food giant will likely review what went wrong during the “configuration change” that triggered such a widespread global outage impacting its operations worldwide. McDonald’s joins a growing list of major companies to experience disruptions from over reliance on centralized technology infrastructure and third party providers.