McDonald's says third-party config change behind global IT outage

McDonald’s has attributed a global technology system outage on Friday evening to a “configuration change” by a third-party provider.

Due to the timing of the issue, it particularly impacted the quick service restaurant’s operations in Asia Pacific and some parts of Europe.

There were varying impacts, but many stores were unable to take orders at all, either via in-store kiosks, at counters or via the mobile app.

Global CIO Brian Rice said the outage started at midnight CDT on Friday - 4pm AEDT - and was caused by the actions of a third-party provider.

Rice said the issue was “quickly identified and corrected” - a “configuration change” to an unspecified part of the system.

But he indicated there would be some lessons taken from the incident around accountability.

“In the coming days, we will be analysing the issue and pushing for accountability across our teams and third-party vendors,” he said.

Rice added that the outage was “an exception to the norm” for McDonald’s.

“Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages,” he said.