Fast food giant McDonald’s suffers global tech outage

‘System failure’ shutters some restaurants for hours, leading to complaints from customers on social media.

Fast food giant McDonald’s has experienced systems failures in several countries that led to some of its restaurants being shuttered for hours, but ruled out cybersecurity issues as a potential cause of the problem.

The United States-based chain said the “technology outage” on Friday affected operations in outlets around the world, including Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom.

McDonald’s in Japan wrote on X that “operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide” and called the incident a “system failure”.

Patrik Hjelte, owner of several McDonald’s restaurants in central Sweden, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidningen that all of the chain’s “restaurants are connected to a global network and that is what’s messed up”.

It was not immediately clear how many stores were affected globally.