McDonalds outage blamed on third-party provider during a configuration change

Good luck getting a Cheeseburger tonight, or a McFlurry, McDonalds stores across Australia and several other countries have gone offline due to an IT systems failure.

That was the situation Friday night Australian time as IT teams at Maccas themselves were in a McFlurry at the office.

McDonalds Australia said in a statement “We are aware of a technology outage currently impacting our restaurants nationwide and are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible,”

Going on to say “We apologise for the inconvenience and thank customers for their patience.”

EFTM understands the outage affected not just in-store systems, but also head office IT systems, emails, networking and more.

It’s also understood the outage reached as far and wide as the UK, Japan, New Zealand and more, along with Australia. Initial reports indicate US stores are unaffected.

The actual root cause is far from being known, but it’s safe to say it is a core and fundamental networking issue, given it’s effect on in-store and office systems.

Given the fast-food chains reliance on computer systems for orders, in-store menus and more – this is as dramatic as Optus losing not just their mobile but also fixed line broadband networks in a single day.

As at late evening, services appeared to be back online – but you can bet it’s all hands on deck over the weekend in the Global IT team.

McDonalds Global Chief Information Officer Brian Rice said in a statement “At approximately midnight CDT on Friday, McDonald’s experienced a global technology system outage, which was quickly identified and corrected. 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. Notably, this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change.“

“Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages. 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 apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.“