On Friday March 15th McDonald’s Corp. operations experienced a widespread loss of function affecting their mobile app., kiosks and digital menus. Systems failures were experienced in Europe, Australia and Asian nations including the major markets of Japan, Taiwan and China that were impacted. The problem was self-inflicted, attributed to a “third party provider introducing a change in configuration” and was nor the result of a cyber-attack.
McDonald’s reported the outage in a release to the SEC. Previously the Company stated “We are increasingly reliant upon technology systems. Any failure or interruption of these systems could significantly impact our or our franchisees’ operations, or our customers’ experiences and perceptions.” In the precautionary statement the Company advised, "The artificial intelligence tools we are incorporating into certain aspects of our restaurant operations may not generate the intended efficiencies and may impact our business results."
In December 2023 McDonald’s Corp. entered into an agreement with Google to host computer systems involving global data storage and retrieval allowing the deployment of a generative AI system to promote service and facilitate market research.
Obviously, an investigation is in process and hopefully will yield results that will be applied to avert similar occurrences both for corporate McDonald’s and its franchisees.