McDonald’s Worldwide Glitch Causes Stir: How It Impacted Operations in Europe and Asia Pacific

 Fast food giant McDonald’s was hit by an outage Friday, throwing the popular chain into disarray mostly across Europe and Asia Pacific as the systems failure forced it to shut stores and suspend orders through its app.

 The system failure appears to have affected customers in areas around the world including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, the U.K., Sweden, Germany, Austria and China, according to news reports and social media posts complaining about the disruption.

Many stores in affected countries have closed their doors and customers are reportedly unable to order using the chain’s app or self-service kiosks.

McDonald’s Japan acknowledged stores had suspended operations amid “a system failure” and said it is working on fixing the issue.

McDonald’s Australia, which is suffering similar outages, issued a similar statement and said the company is aware of “a technology outage impacting our restaurants” and is working to resolve the issue “as soon as possible.”

It is not clear what has caused the outage or when systems will return to normal but the company’s British entity ruled out a potential cyberattack.

It’s not clear if, or to what extent, the outage has impacted McDonald’s’ U.S. operations. The timing of the outage would minimize disruption in the U.S. but there are indications the country’s stores are also affected and there are reports of outages or issues on the McDonald’s app across the country on Downdetector, a site that monitors the status of various digital services.

41,822. That’s how many McDonald’s stores there are worldwide in 115 countries, according to company data from the end of 2023. Around 13,500 of these are located in the U.S. Of countries known to be affected by the outage, Japan has the highest number of stores, around 3,000, followed by the U.K., nearly 1,500, and Australia, around 1,000. Overall, the chain has some 6,000 restaurants in China, nearly 1,250 in Europe, nearly 2,600 in Latin America and nearly 1,900 in the Middle East.

Some McDonald’s branches have resorted to a cash-only system with staff calculating orders on paper, according to the BBC, citing social media posts from Japan.