McDonald’s, the popular global fast-food chain, was struck by an unprecedented outage on Friday when customers in different locations across the world, were unable to place orders using the restaurant chain’s official app. The outage is significant in light of the US$ 200 Billion corporation’s increased adoption of emerging technologies as well as its recent multi-year deal for Cloud migration to optimize processes and increase efficiency.
How and where did it happen?
It all began when customers started finding it impossible to use the app to place orders on Friday. A notification on the app read, “We’re currently experiencing issues with the app. Mobile Order, Deals and Rewards are temporarily unavailable. We apologise for the inconvenience caused.” Meanwhile, in some outlets, self-service kiosks stopped functioning, and employees had to resort to resort to the old-fashioned pen and paper method to take orders.
Outages were reported from Japan, China, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the United Kingdom and even the United States. Some outlets reportedly started sending customers away after a point and remained shut for hours. The outage also impacted the drive through operations at some outlets. McDonald’s runs as many as 40,000 outlets worldwide, and it is still not known exactly how many of these were impacted by the outage and to what extent.
In an official statement released on March 15, Brian Rice (EVP, Global Chief Information Officer, McDonald’s) said, “At approximately midnight CDT on Friday, McDonald’s experienced a global technology system outage, which was quickly identified and corrected. Many markets are back online, and the rest are in the process of coming back online.” He also dismissed concerns surrounding a possible cyberattack saying, “We are closely working with those markets that are still experiencing issues. Notably, this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event; rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change.”
Digital transformation dreams disrupted?
It is still not known what service was provided by the third-party vendor and what configuration was being changed at the time of the outage. However, it is noteworthy that in December 2023, McDonald’s had announced plans for “a new multi-year, global partnership to connect Google Cloud technology across thousands of its restaurants worldwide.” The food service industry major hopes to leverage a wide range of Google Cloud’s hardware, data, and AI technologies “to implement innovation faster and create even better experiences for its customers, restaurant teams, and employees.”
While the global outage does seem to have thrown a temporary spanner in the works for McDonald’s digital transformation journey, nothing in McDonald’s statement pointed to this Cloud migration or AI adoption being the reasons behind the outage.
All’s well that ends well
On March 16, in an update, Rice said, “I’m pleased to share that all of our restaurants globally are now open and serving customers. 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.”