McDonald's suffers worldwide outage
Fast-food giant McDonald’s is experiencing a worldwide outage of its computer systems, which is preventing stores in Australia from processing orders.
Customers in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Japan have also complained that stores were shut at the same time as the Australian outage. Customers also reported outages in Austria, Germany, Sweden, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Kings Cross McDonald’s is normally bustling with delivery drivers on Friday evening but was almost empty due to the outage.
Australian stores started to have problems about 4pm on Friday.
Staff posted pictures of blank computer screens, saying they had little information and gave little indication of when the computer systems would go back online.
A McDonald’s Australia spokesperson apologised for the inconvenience and thanked customers for their patience.
“We are aware of a technology outage currently impacting our restaurants nationwide and are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible,” the spokesperson said.
One employee said on social media, “I can confirm All McDonald’s Stores are currently closed as our POS [Point of Sale] systems aren’t working.
“We don’t know what’s going on at [this] stage or any ETAs. We apologise for any inconvenience.”
McDonald’s Australia could not say what the cause of the outage was, or if it was a cyberattack.
In the Blue Mountains near Sydney, hungry locals said staff had barricaded the drive-through at one franchise to prevent customers from entering.
Further north, federal MP for the Hunter, Dan Repacholi, took to his social media profile to inform constituents about the situation.
“There will be no snacks on the way home tonight. Thoughts and prayers,” he said.
Some customers observed long queues at neighbouring KFC franchises, while employees at stores in Sydney’s west had been writing down orders on paper and accepting cash from customers.
Customers at stores across the country, including at Bondi Junction, reported the systems came back online again briefly before 7pm, before shutting down again.
In Japan, a company spokesman described the issue as a “system disruption”.
There are 869 McDonald’s restaurants across Australia, which are visited by 1.7 million customers every day.
The company estimates its economic contribution is equivalent to 0.2 per cent to Australia’s GDP every year.
With agencies
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