System failures at McDonald鈥檚 were reported worldwide Friday, shuttering some restaurants for hours and leading to social media complaints from customers, in what the fast food chain called a 鈥渢echnology outage鈥 that was being fixed.
said the problems were not related to a cybersecurity attack, without giving more details on what caused them.
鈥淲e are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved,鈥 the burger giant said in a statement. 鈥淲e thank customers for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.鈥
Earlier, on X, formerly Twitter, that 鈥渙perations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide,鈥 calling it 鈥渁 system failure.鈥 In Hong Kong, that a 鈥渃omputer system failure鈥 knocked out orders online and through self-serve kiosks.
Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a spike in problems with the McDonald鈥檚 app in the last few hours.
Some McDonald鈥檚 restaurants were operating normally again after the outage, with people ordering and getting their food at locations in Bangkok, Milan and London.
A worker at a restaurant in Bangkok said the system was down for about an hour, making it impossible to take online or credit card payments but allowing it to still accept cash for orders.
At another location in Thailand鈥檚 capital, there was plywood over a door with a sign saying, 鈥淭echnicians are updating the system,鈥 even as customers were ordering again and paying digitally.
A worker at a Milan restaurant noted that the system was offline for a couple of hours and a technician walked them through getting it back up and running.
A spokesperson for McDonald鈥檚 in Denmark said the 鈥渢echnology failure鈥 was resolved there and its restaurants were open.
Media outlets reported that customers from Australia to the U.K. had complained of issues with ordering, including a customer in Australia who posted a photo to X saying a kiosk was unavailable.
鈥滱ll McDonald鈥檚 restaurants are connected to a global network and that is what鈥檚 messed up,鈥 Patrik Hjelte, owner of several McDonald鈥檚 restaurants in central Sweden, near the Norwegian border, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidning.
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AP journalists Jintamas Saksornchai and David Cohen in Bangkok, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark; Kelvin Chan in London; Colleen Barry in Milan; and Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed.
Courtney Bonnell, The Associated Press