McDonald’s outages! Big Mac goes Big Tech, with quite a few hiccups
When McDonald's first opened for business in the 1940s, its workers stood at physical counters, its burgers and fries were listed on paper menus, and its customers paid cash to its human cashiers.
How quaint.
Big Mac, as it is popularly known, has taken to big tech in every way imaginable way. Today technology so infuses every aspect of McDonald's business that it would only be a slight exaggeration to call it a tech company that happens to sell burgers.
McDonald's mobile app; its human-less, order-taking kiosks; its digitized menus that change based on trends, the weather and more; and even its generative AI - together, these enable McDonald's to eke out additional sales and efficiencies worth billions of dollars to the company, which has 40,000 locations in roughly 100 countries.
Yet that same tech can also bring McDonald's to its knees.
On Friday, system outages plagued McDonald's locations across some of its biggest global markets, including Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom, forcing many stores to temporarily take only cash or shut down entirely. McDonald's hasn't disclosed how widespread the outages were, but on Friday afternoon, 12 hours after the outages were first reported, a franchise in San Antonio, Texas wouldn't accept orders in its app and couldn't accept cash.
McDonald's said in a statement the outage was caused by an unnamed third-party provider during a "configuration change". Asked for comment, McDonald's referred to that statement. McDonald's Japan on Saturday apologized for the inconvenience, saying all its restaurants and its delivery service were operating normally.
The burger giant did flag that something like this could happen, at least to Wall Street.
“We are increasingly reliant upon technology systems,” company lawyers wrote in its annual Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Feb. 22. “Any failure or interruption of these systems could significantly impact our or our franchisees' operations, or our customers' experiences and
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