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A McDonald’s restaurant in Tokyo, photographed in January 2020.
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cnn
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McDonald’s was hit Friday by a system outage that closed restaurants and disrupted online and in-app ordering around the world, including the United States, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.
At approximately 1 a.m. Eastern Time McDonald’s (DCM) “experienced a global technology system outage, which was quickly identified and corrected,” global chief information officer Brian Rice said in a statement posted on the company’s website.
“Many markets have come back online and the rest are in the process of coming back online,” he said. “This issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party vendor during a configuration change.”
Earlier, A cashier at a McDonald’s store in New York told CNN that the store’s computer system went down around 1 a.m. and came back online around 5 a.m.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s Japan said in a Friday X post: “Many stores across the country have temporarily suspended operations.”
In the United Kingdom, Maria Avram, who works at a McDonald’s restaurant in London, told CNN that there was a system outage between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time (2 a.m. and 3 a.m. ET), and staff had to take orders in person and tell their colleagues in the kitchen what cook.
A McDonald’s Australia spokesperson told CNN its restaurants across the country were affected by the outage.
Problems were also reported in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
McDonald’s Hong Kong said on Facebook: “Due to a computer system failure, mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks are not working. Please order directly at the restaurant counter.” Those services have since been restored, he later said.
The fast food chain’s McDelivery service in Taiwan said on its website: “The system is under maintenance and online and telephone ordering services are temporarily suspended.”
Taiwanese broadcaster TVBS quoted McDonald’s Taiwan as saying on Friday that some of its restaurants, as well as McDelivery, were temporarily unable to conduct transactions due to internet outages. McDonald’s assured its customers that it is investigating the situation and making necessary repairs, TVBS said.
McDonald’s has more than 41,800 stores worldwide, with nearly 13,500 in the United States, its largest market.
Of the other affected countries, Japan has the largest number of McDonald’s restaurants (almost 3,000), followed by the United Kingdom, with about 1,500 stores, and Australia, with just over 1,000.
The disruption adds to a shaky start to the year for McDonald’s. During its latest earnings presentation last month, the company said the war in the Middle East was hurting its business and would likely continue to do so. Like other American brands, it has been hit by boycotts in several markets in the region.
Chief Executive Christopher Kempczinski said McDonald’s was also seeing some negative impact on sales in other Muslim countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.
This story has been updated with additional information.