McDonald’s says it has resolved the technical problems facing UK customers following a series of global outages.
Customers in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Austria were also unable to order food owing to a series of IT issues.
Problems started in the early hours and continued throughout the morning.
McDonald’s said the issue was unrelated to cyber-security and apologised to customers. It is unclear whether the problem has been resolved elsewhere.
“We are aware of a technology outage which impacted our restaurants. The issue has now been resolved in the UK and Ireland,” the company said in a statement.
“We thank customers for their patience and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
In the UK, one franchise owner confirmed to the BBC that some of her 21 branches had been affected on Friday morning.
Sarah McLean who runs a Midlands franchise said her area managers said there had been an “IT outage”.
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 users in the UK 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?”
In Japan the fast food chain confirmed there was a “system failure” and asked customers to “wait for a while” for service to be restored.
Social media users have also complained of issues in several countries, including in China and Sweden.
Other posters in Australia on the social media channel Reddit reported major disruption.
Earlier, a spokesperson for Australian McDonald’s confirmed the outage was impacting its restaurants nationwide and that it was working to resolve the issue “as soon as possible”.
Posting on X, Ted Anderson said he went into a restaurant in Japan to find it cash only and staff “calculating the totals on paper”.
Social media user Ester Gjorek said McDonald’s Germany “is down”, and “it seems in Austria too”.
In New Zealand, X user Germin van Royen said: “The Mcdonalds outage is crazy. Went in tonight and drive thru + all kiosks were down. A system that can fail nation wide is bad but across multiple countries too!? Bonkers.”
McDonald’s in Japan said: “There is currently a system failure. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and ask that you please wait for a while until the service is restored.”
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.
