Some McDonald's outlets back online after tech outage in several countries

TOKYO (Reuters) -Some McDonald's stores were back online after a global technology outage on Friday disrupted operations for a few hours at many of the restaurant chain's outlets in markets including Japan, Australia and the UK.

"Many markets are back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online. We are closely working with those markets that are still experiencing issues," McDonald's Global Chief Information Officer Brian Rice said in a statement.

The fast food giant ruled out the possibility of a cybersecurity incident and said the outage was caused by a third-party provider during a "configuration change".

McDonald's did not comment on the number of stores impacted.

Many of its stores in Japan had stopped taking in-person and mobile customer orders because of the system disruption. A spokesperson at McDonald's Holdings Company Japan said recovery work was in progress and operations were resuming at some stores.

The company's outlets in Australia, the UK and Ireland were fully back online after the outage, regional representatives said.

McDonald's has about 40,000 outlets worldwide, with more than 14,000 stores in the United States.

The outage seemed to be have affected customers in Hong Kong and New Zealand as well, with people taking to social media to complain about disruptions at stores.

Earlier this month, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram also faced technical issues that disrupted global services for hundreds of thousands of users for more than two hours.

(Reporting by Kantaro Komiya and Kiyoshi Takenaka in Tokyo, Shubham Kalia, Harshita Meenaktshi and Rishav Chatterjee in Bengalaru, Muvija M in London; Editing by Sharon Singleton, Gareth Jones and Devika Syamnath)