© Reuters. A sign for the U.S. fast food restaurant chain McDonald’s is seen outside one of their restaurants in Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, near Brussels, Belgium March 4, 2024. REUTERS/Yves Herman/file photo
TOKYO (Reuters) -McDonald’s said on Friday a technology outage had disrupted operations at many of its outlets worldwide, including Japan, UK and Australia, but ruled out the possibility of a cybersecurity incident.
Many McDonald’s (NYSE:) 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 it was working to restore operations soon.
“We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved,” McDonald’s said in a statement.
The company said its outlets in the UK 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.
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.
Earlier this month, Meta-owned Facebook (NASDAQ:) and Instagram also faced technical issues that disrupted global services for hundreds of thousands of users for more than two hours.
