McDonald's blames global outage on third party

McDonald's has revealed the technical problems which brought much of its fast food chain to a standstill on Friday were caused by a third party provider.

The international restaurant said the global outage happened during a "configuration change" and stopped stores taking orders in the UK, Australia and Japan - amongst others.

McDonald's stressed the issue was not caused by a cyber attack.

Stores in the UK and Australia are open again after their systems froze.

Those in Japan are reportedly also resuming trade after being forced to close.

The company experienced a "global technology system outage, which was quickly identified and corrected," McDonald's chief information officer Brian Rice, said.

He said many countries were now operating normally while the rest were in the process of coming back online.

"Notably, this issue was not directly caused by a cybersecurity event - rather, it was caused by a third-party provider during a configuration change," he added.

Mr Rice said what had happened was the "exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it".

Problems started in the early hours and continued throughout the morning, but the company would not say how many stores were affected.

Sarah McLean, who owns a franchise across the Midlands, said that all of her 21 branches had been affected.

"My restaurants were impacted very early in the morning, so thankfully the impact wasn't too significant, about an hour and a half," she told the BBC. But during that time they "couldn't serve anyone".

Downdetector, a system used to monitor IT problems in businesses, noted a spike in issues with the McDonald's UK app from around 05:00 GMT on Friday.

Some social media s posted their discontent.

"@McDonaldsUK why can I order through the app this morning but all of my local McDonald's are closed when they are meant to be 24 hours?!" Tom Bennison in the East Midlands posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Andrew Evans in Birmingham posted: "Hmmm @McDonaldsUK my local is turning everyone away saying there's a national outage on your ordering system":[]}