LONDON -- McDonald's apologized Friday for a global technology glitch that shuttered some restaurants for hours.
The company said the problem was with a third-party technology provider and was not a cybersecurity issue. It started about 12 a.m. during a configuration change and was close to being resolved about 12 hours later, the Chicago-based company said.
"Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages. I understand that this impacts you, your restaurant teams and our customers," Brian Rice, the company's global chief information officer, said in a statement.
"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 apologize for any inconvenience this has caused," the statement added.
The company said the problem also wasn't related to its shift to Google Cloud as a technology provider. In December, McDonald's announced a multi-year partnership with Google that will move restaurant computations from servers into the cloud. The partnership is designed to speed up tasks like ordering at kiosks and to help managers optimize staffing.
Earlier Friday, McDonald's in Japan posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that "operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide," calling it "a system failure." In Hong Kong, the chain said on Facebook that a "computer system failure" knocked out orders online and through self-serve kiosks.
Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a spike in problems with the McDonald's app over several hours.
Some McDonald's restaurants were operating normally again after the system failure, with people ordering and getting their food Friday at locations in Bangkok, Milan and London.
A worker at a restaurant in Bangkok said the system was down for about an hour, making it impossible to take online or credit card payments but allowing it to still accept cash for orders.
At another location in Thailand's capital, there was plywood over a door with a sign saying, "Technicians are updating the system," even as customers were ordering again and paying digitally.
A worker at a Milan restaurant noted that the system was offline for a couple of hours and a technician walked them through getting it back up and running.
A spokesperson for McDonald's in Denmark said the "technology failure" was resolved there and restaurants were open.
Media outlets reported that customers from Australia to the U.K. had complained of issues with ordering, including a customer in Australia who posted a photo to X saying a kiosk was unavailable.
Information for this article was contributed by Jintamas Saksornchai, David Cohen, Jan M. Olsen, Kelvin Chan, Colleen Barry and Yuri Kageyamaof The Associated Press.