After a horror 12 hours for Macca’s stores across the globe on Friday, a bunch of restaurants were able to reopen after being temporarily shut down.
In an interview with Weekend Today, tech expert Trevor Long told hosts that the issue was unlikely to have been a hack or another cybersecurity issue.
“What I would say that means is somewhere in the network, a routing issue has stopped all traffic on the McDonalds network, which has affected point of sale,” Long explained.
“Every part of the business, including their back office systems.”
Macca’s have since stated that the issue was due to a third-party tech provider which sounds pretty anticlimactic ngl.
In Australia, the blackout began at 4:30pm, with some restaurants reporting continued issues until 8:30pm that night.
I simply cannot fathom anything worse. Imagine missing out on a drunken, late-night Big Mac Meal because of … tech issues.
Per The Advertiser, staff at a Macca’s branch in South Australia reportedly began writing down orders on physical paper (what even is that?) and requested cash-only payments (again, what even is that?).
The MyMacca’s app also experienced issues relating to digital payments.
Recently, Macca’s pivoted to using Google Cloud, an online service assisting with data storage, analytics and management tools.
The deal between Macca’s and Google was signed as part of a multi-year agreement to host the company’s computations in the Cloud, rather than on servers.
This was done with the aim of decreasing the time taken to order chippies (optimising kiosk speeds) and helping managers organise which staff members are on chip duty (timetabling).
The outage is not believed to be linked to this changeover.
The interruption didn’t just affect Australia, but also Japan, the United Kingdom and New Zealand where more restaurants were forced to close. According to the ABC, Canada, Hong Kong, Germany and Austria were also caught up in the tech failure.
Header image Kokkai Ng via iStock.
