McDonald's hit by tech outage in several countries around the world

McDonald's said on Friday a technology outage had disrupted operations at many of its outlets worldwide, including in Japan, the United Kingdom and Australia, but ruled out the possibility of a cybersecurity incident.

Many McDonald's stores in Japan stopped taking in-person and mobile customer orders because of the system disruption, a spokesperson at McDonald's Holdings Company Japan said, adding that the company was working to restore operations soon.

The company said its outlets in the U.K. and Ireland were fully back online after the outage, while McDonald's Australia said most of its restaurants had reopened.

The fast food chain has about 40,000 restaurants worldwide, with more than 14,000 stores in the United States. It operates nearly 3,000 stores across Japan and roughly 1,000 in Australia, its websites for the regions show. In Canada, there are more than 1,400 stores.

"We are aware of a technology outage which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved," Kristen Hunter, a spokesperson for McDonald's Canada, said in a statement to CBC. "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."

It was not immediately clear how many stores were impacted globally by the technology outage. McDonald's did not respond to a request for comment on the same.

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.

The New York Times said McDonald's Hong Kong was experiencing a "computer system failure," and that the mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks were not functioning.

"All McDonald's restaurants are connected to a global network and that is what's messed up," Patrik Hjelte, owner of several McDonald's restaurants in central Sweden, near the Norwegian border, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidning. "Right now we are restarting all systems and we hope to be up and running again as usual soon."