As McDonald’s Recovers From a Global Outage, It Looks to Prevention And Accountability

McDonald’s Corp. on Sunday showed signs it had largely recovered from a widespread system outage that began early Friday and shut down service, prevented card payments, and scrambled digital orders for hours at thousands of restaurants around the world. Now, the company is seeking the cause and promising to hold parties inside and outside McDonald’s accountable for the widespread technical failure.

The fast-food giant, which operates or franchises nearly 42,000 locations in 119 countries, did not release details about the cause of the outage, but technicians had apparently restored service by the end of the day Saturday, according to a statement McDonald’ s issued the same day.

“I’m pleased to share that all of our restaurants globally are now open and serving customers,” said Brian Rice, chief information officer and an executive vice president at the Chicago-based fast-food giant, in a statement issued Saturday and aimed at restaurant operators. “Local technology teams will continue to provide support as needed. In the coming days, we will be analyzing the issue and pushing for accountability across our teams and third-party vendors.”

The statement did not indicate specific details regarding the cause of the widespread outage. But an earlier update from Rice said it had been traced to “a third-party provider during a configuration change.” That led the company to rule out a cybersecurity attack.

Rice’s statement indicates the problem was “quickly identified and corrected.” He calls the outage “an exception to the norm” and a problem the company had worked quickly to resolve. But he also hinted this isn’t the end of the matter as McDonald’s works to prevent the problem from recurring.

The Wall Street Journal reported early Saturday the global glitch started shortly after midnight Friday and affected an estimated 9,000 of the company’s 13,500 U.S. stores, besides those impacted overseas. The issue prevented some operators from opening, while forcing others to ask for cash from customers as point-of-sale systems failed. The failure of online systems also impacted the company’s mobile app, which allows customers to place orders for pickup later at nearby locations.

Downdetector, an online utility that measures outages on a representative sample of specific apps, reported 13 outages for the McDonalds app early in the afternoon Saturday, compared to a “baseline,” or expected number, of four. By six o’clock, that number hadn’t changed, but by nearly 11 p.m. it had dwindled to two, equaling the baseline.