McDonald’s Gets Grilled by Fans Following Global Tech Outages

McDonald's sign before troubling skies.

The McDonald's "McBlackout" isn't a cool limited-edition menu item, it's the fan-given name to a rather unfortunate tech issue affecting McDonald's systems all over the world.

On Friday, March 15, several McDonald's locations had reported a systems outage, causing some restaurants to lose out on orders and suspend operations.

McDonald's in Japan posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide," calling it “a system failure.” A Facebook post made by McDonald's Hong Kong chain said that a “computer system failure” knocked out orders online and through self-serve kiosks.

Hours later, restaurants in Hong Kong, London, Bangkok and Milan, had some service restored, as the locations suggested customers utilize mobile ordering or the self-checkout kiosks.

As for Mickey D's U.S. headquarters, officials there have been made aware of the global outages and issued the following statement: “We are aware of a technology outage, which impacted our restaurants; the issue is now being resolved. We thank customers for their patience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

But McDonald's may have spoken too soon when thanking customers, as in the aftermath of the outage, social media became overrun with criticism and memes poking fun at the burger joint's tech flop.

"McDonalds is down worldwide.. what," one X user shared alongside a gif of Homer Simpson alerting Springfield that the "end is near."

"Getting a breaking news notification from the BBC telling me that people can't order at McDonalds is peak UK culture," another joked.

A third criticized the company for apparently moving away from cash transactions, "Oh Well McDonalds, if you don’t like cash and rely on the Tap and Go Internet transactions only then you lose."

Someone else called the entire situation "bonkers," writing, "The Mcdonald's 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 across the world have a system failure and are closed today. People are calling it the 'Mc Blackout' #mcdonalds," a different user quipped.

The mockery didn't end there, continue reading for more viral commentary:

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