U.S.A. | McDonald's has apologised following a technical outage that impacted many global markets.
At approximately midnight CDT on Friday, 15th March, McDonald’s experienced a global technical outage, which was quickly identified and corrected. Many markets have since been back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online. McDonald's said it had worked closely with those markets that are still experiencing issues. Notably, this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change.
Brian Rice, EVP global chief information officer, said he wanted to provide an update on the matter.
"I’m pleased to share that all of our restaurants globally are now open and serving customers. Local technology teams will continue to provide support as needed. In the coming days, we will be analysing the issue and pushing for accountability across our teams and third-party vendors," said Rice.
"We sincerely regret the inconvenience that we know this caused you, your teams and your customers. Thank you again for your patience and your support as our teams worked together to tirelessly resolve this issue."
Rice added that reliability and stability of McDonald's technology and its systems was a priority, and he acknowledged how frustrating it can be when there are outages. In a message to restaurant and franchise owners around the world, Rich said it had been unusual circumstances.
"I understand that this impacts you, your restaurant teams and our customers. What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it. Thank you for your patience, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this has caused."
Australia, the UK, Japan and China were among the international markets where the technical outage occurred, with drive-through, restaurant, and online ordering services down.
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