Update 18/03/2024 – McDonald’s CIO Brian Rice shared an update on the problems at the fast food chain. The outage “was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change”.
Rice indicates that McDonald’s quickly identified and resolved the cause of the global outage. The CIO also reiterates that the problem “was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event”.
Many restaurants reopened their doors on Friday. By Saturday, the problem was resolved for all affected branches. Rice says it will analyse the problem further in the coming days, ” pushing for accountability across our teams and third-party vendors”.
Original – McDonald’s restaurants had to close because a network problem caused an outage. However, the issue has been resolved, and it is now possible to eat and drink at the branches again.
The fast food chain emphasizes that the IT failure is unrelated to a cyber attack. It concerns a network problem. However, it is unknown what exactly is going on. A global impact and network-related outage indicate the problem lies deep within the infrastructure.
Global impact
The fast-food chain restaurants in the Netherlands also suffered from the outage. Because of the problem, it was impossible to order, as the cash registers and order kiosks were out of order. McDonald’s informed RTL Nieuws that it is unknown how many Dutch locations were affected. In the Netherlands, the fast food chain has about 260 restaurants.
Reports of visitors running into the IT problem soon began to arrive on social media. Customers in the United Kingdom, Germany and Sweden were also unable to eat at the chain because of the outage. Customers in China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand were also unable to order because of the network problem. Some visitors were even faced with a closed door. This is the first time McDonald’s has faced an outage of this magnitude.
The doors have since reopened. We will update this post as soon as more is known about the IT outage.
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