In a clarifying statement, McDonald’s, the world’s largest fast-food chain, has vehemently denied that a cyber attack was the cause of the global outage that crippled its operations last Friday. The unprecedented incident forced restaurants across multiple countries, including Australia, Japan, the UK, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Hong Kong, and Canada, to temporarily close or face significant disruptions.
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McDonald’s Refutes Cyber Attack Claims Amid Global System Outage
The outage, which McDonald’s categorized as a “technology outage,” was initially attributed to a third-party provider responsible for payment processing. However, the company has since confirmed that the issue stemmed from a configuration change made by the vendor, rather than a malicious cyber attack.
Addressing concerns and misconceptions, McDonald’s Australia took to social media to reassure customers and provide updates on the situation. In a Twitter post, the company stated, “Earlier today, we experienced a technology outage which impacted all of our restaurants. This wasn’t related to a cybersecurity event, and most restaurants have now re-opened and are serving up all your faves.”
Brian Rice, McDonald’s global chief information officer, acknowledged the gravity of the situation and apologized for the inconvenience caused. “Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages,” he said. “What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it. Thank you for your patience, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.”
The fast-food giant is currently in the process of transitioning to Google Cloud as one of its technology providers, with the aim of increasing the efficiency of kiosk ordering and other systems. However, McDonald’s unequivocally stated that the outage was unrelated to its ongoing cloud migration efforts.
