McDonald's tech outage disrupts service around the world
Some McDonald's (MCD) restaurants around the world were faced with system disruptions and even forced to suspend service after a technology outage impacted operations. In a statement to Yahoo Finance, the company says "the issue is now being resolved" and that "Notably, the issue is not related to a cybersecurity event.”
Yahoo Finance's Alexandra Canal discusses the details in the video above.
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Editor's note: This article was written by Stephanie Mikulich.
Video Transcript
SEANA SMITH: McDonald's facing several outages worldwide, which resulted in store closures for hours, impacting online app ordering as well. You're looking at a move here to the downside for McDonald's, the Dow component. Yahoo Finance's Alexandra Canal joining us with those details, Ali.
ALEXANDRA CANAL: Yeah, and we're talking global outages here-- Milan, Bangkok. London. Down Detector, which is a website that tracks a lot of these outages, shows that the spike began to happen overnight, around 1:00 AM, affecting countries and regions in the US, UK, and Australia.
McDonald's did respond to the outages in a statement to Yahoo Finance, writing, quote, "We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants. 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."
So no cyber attack as of now as of what we know. McDonald's, though, has been heavily relying on its digital channels on online ordering over the past few years, and that's shown up as a big driver of growth in recent quarters. So any outage of this magnitude could affect growth. We've also seen same store sales come under pressure recently as McDonald's has been hit with the impact of inflation.
Now, we've seen tweets from McDonald's Japan, for example, who did refer to the outage as a system failure and that many of its stores were suspending operations and not taking orders as a result. Hong Kong and Taiwan had similar messages on social media.
The fast food chain has about 40,000 restaurants worldwide. It wasn't immediately clear how many restaurants had been affected here. But it's interesting to think that we saw Meta's Facebook and Instagram face outages earlier this month. So any technical outage where people don't have access to that website access to ordering and you have to result in full blown closures, that's not a great thing. So hopefully, McDonald's can figure out what exactly happened here.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah, I was even taking a look at the McDonald's Japan account and doing my best to try and translate. I mean, fortunately, there's a button that I could just hit on there. I was getting grilled by our team, by the way, over the validity of that translation. I don't know, Google says it's translated, so I believe it.
But at the end of the day, I mean, this does come back down to the digital prominence that McDonald's is moving to and through actually at this point and also the regional basis that they're growing out on Asia-Pacific. Amazingly important to getting this right. So it'll be interesting to see what more they have to say about that.
ALEXANDRA CANAL: Yeah, globally, McDonald's has been making a big push. We know that their loyalty programs, which stems from digital, that's been a really important aspect of the company. So when you affect things like loyalty programs and the access for consumers, they're not going to be too happy about that. And they may decide to go to a competitor.
So luckily, they do seem to be resolving this issue. Stores do seem to be reopening. But they're going to have to figure out exactly why this happened.
SEANA SMITH: A top trending story here at this morning and businesses. All right, Ali, thanks so much.
