McDonald’s was hit with a technology outage on Friday that affected stores in some of its biggest global markets outside the U.S.
The company acknowledged the problem in a statement and said that it was not related to any “cybersecurity event.” McDonald’s said the outage was caused by “a third-party provider during a configuration change.”
“We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants,” the company said in an email. “The issue is now being resolved. 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.”
The outage hit the company’s global technology system at Midnight CDT, McDonald’s said in an update on Friday. The issue has been corrected and many markets are either back online or in the process of coming back online.
“We are working closely with those markets that are still experiencing issues,” Brian Rice, global chief information officer, said in a statement. “Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages.”
“What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it,” he added.
The problem appeared to affect McDonald’s restaurants in Japan, the U.K. and Australia. There is no evidence that it has affected its U.S. locations. The tech outage left some stores in these markets unable to take either mobile or in-person orders, according to reports from around the world overnight.
McDonald’s operates more than 41,000 global locations. The outage highlights some of the risks of a business more reliant on information technology than ever, as periodic outages of certain systems can halt business for a time.
UPDATE: This story has been updated with additional details and comments from McDonald’s.
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