Last Friday (3/15), McDonald’s experienced a global system outage, affecting McDonald’s apps and restaurant ordering systems in over ten countries worldwide. Reports of the outage came from countries including the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, and Taiwan, among others. Restaurant staff had to resort to manual order-taking using pen and paper, providing handwritten orders to the kitchen. McDonald’s Global CIO, Brian Rice, issued an apology and explanation for the global outage later that day.
According to reports on the Downdetector outage reporting website, users from around the world reported the outage for nearly 20 hours. Among the reported incidents, 58% were related to app outages, 30% occurred at the physical checkout counters in the restaurants, and 12% were related to the McDonald’s website. This indicates that the system outage not only affected McDonald’s globally but also impacted both digital and physical channels.
Brian Rice, on March 15, released a statement apologizing to customers, global employees, franchisees, and partners, confirming the occurrence of the global system outage. He admitted that the root cause of the major outage was a configuration error by a third-party supplier and not a cybersecurity attack. However, he did not provide further details and emphasized that stability and reliability are top priorities for McDonald’s technology development. Nevertheless, this outage significantly affected customers and restaurant teams. Based on their preliminary investigation, the configuration issue leading to the outage was an exception rather than standard operation. At the time of the announcement, only a few restaurant systems had started to recover, and they were working tirelessly to resolve the problems and restore the systems in McDonald’s restaurants worldwide.
With over 40,000 locations in more than 100 countries, McDonald’s aims to increase its number of stores to 50,000 globally by 2027, as announced by McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski at an event in the company’s Chicago headquarters last December. They also plan to increase their membership base from the current 150 million to 250 million people and grow their revenue from $20 billion to $45 billion by 2027. Additionally, they aim for the McDonald’s mobile app’s order volume to account for 30% of total transactions by 2027.
To achieve these goals, McDonald’s announced a strategic partnership with Google in December of last year to deploy a customized operating environment for all customer and restaurant digital platforms. This includes the mobile app, loyalty program, and in-store kiosk ordering systems. They also plan to leverage Google’s distributed cloud to deploy on-premises systems in thousands of McDonald’s restaurants, not just to support the aforementioned systems but also to develop new applications related to generative AI.
Google is not McDonald’s sole cloud provider; they have been using AWS public cloud since 2014. In 2016-2017, they migrated many core and peripheral applications to the public cloud. They focused on moving customer-facing critical applications and mobile apps to the cloud, enabling global customers to order and pay through the mobile app. They also strengthened integration with third-party delivery services, expanding McDonald’s business beyond physical stores.
Regarding infrastructure, McDonald’s has embraced containerization. In recent years, they have actively adopted microservices architecture, containerization technology, and API-first approaches. They have also utilized public cloud services to build a hybrid cloud architecture. In 2023, they prioritized the development of observability architecture to enhance the operational capabilities of their digital platforms. Furthermore, in 2023, they utilized AWS Lambda to build the loyalty program system, specifically to support the information infrastructure required to reach a membership base of 250 million. As of now, over 40% of McDonald’s performance in the six major markets is derived from digital channels.