from Hacker News

McDonald's Closes Amid Global IT Outage

by ytch on 3/15/24, 8:18 AM with 74 comments

  • by usr1106 on 3/15/24, 8:42 AM

    Story time: In Germany in the 1980s an American asked me on the train for a restaurant recommendation in a town of 60,000. I thought hard for a place with good food and made big efforts to describe how to get there.

    In the end he asked: Is there no McDonalds?

    We had had one for about 5 years, but I had not considered it a restaurant. It's a different thing :) Right, it's just around the the corner from the train station, 2 minute walk.

  • by apimade on 3/15/24, 1:26 PM

    This is all second-hand and probably wrong, but I worked for MuleSoft shortly after McDonalds began to pull the plug on them after they experienced two regional outages. The outage was a matter of minutes, not hours, but payments weren’t affected. It only affected, as far as I know, kiosks - this was before they were everywhere.

    I can imagine this will cost a few heads at McDonalds who didn’t have a DRP or BCP which included secondary payment infrastructure. Even if you were paying double retail rates and ate the cost for your franchisees, it would have been worth it.

    For a company so dependent on external vendors, I’m surprised we don’t see more outages. I was always surprised to hear they outsourced their integration infrastructure for the core business. I’m sure it’s like that elsewhere given the number of customer stories floating around for McDonalds.

    They have the capital, brand, network and infrastructure to be a tech powerhouse. But they’re not.

    https://www.mastercardservices.com/en/dynamic-yield/case-stu...

    https://blogs.mulesoft.com/digital-transformation/business/m...

    https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/mcdonalds/

    https://www.evoke-creative.com/projects/mcdonalds

    https://www.abbyy.com/customer-stories/mcdonalds-relies-on-a...

    https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2023/mcdonald-s-corporat...

  • by FredPret on 3/15/24, 2:23 PM

    When I was a kid in the 90s, I would excitedly rant to my dad about what a life-and-death issue cybersecurity was. He said "but the computer only does the accounting, nothing is connected to it - business can continue for a while without it."

    Interesting how you can't even get a hamburger without being connected now. I'm not sure if I'm happy about having been right.

  • by usr1106 on 3/15/24, 8:28 AM

    That they have nationwide systems does not surprise me.

    But that it's a global system does surprise me. Their main market should be the US, but EU data protection is legally mostly incompatible. I am pretty sure they have major violations.

    For FAANGs that's not news and they have their cases with the commission regularly. But for pretty old brick and mortar restaurant business I am suprised.

    Edit: Of course the central recipes are globally standard. But otherwise I'd expect the logistics more regional. Especially for Australia mentioned in the article.

  • by dusted on 3/15/24, 10:33 AM

    Burgers.. They are not transported via HTTP (yet), and still, we can't buy them due to IT trouble?

    Seems easy enough.. You tell what you want, they make it, you hand over your cash money and they hand over the burger.

  • by hagbard_c on 3/15/24, 8:11 PM

    My personal McDonald's data-security history: having been part of Hacking in Progress '97 in the Netherlands where I got a coupon for a free burger at McDonald's. Not being a regular - as in never going to - McDonald's I thought I'd give it a try as there happened to be a McDonald's drive-through in Lelystad which was on my route home.

    (Maybe this is where I should explain that I was cycling home with a cycle cart behind my bike filled with computer and camping hardware, wearing wooden shoes)

    I entered the drive-through lane behind a car but when it was my turn the woman behind the counter said 'only cars allowed'.

    That was close to the first and thus far the last time I went to a McDonald's. It is also a good example of correlation without causation...

  • by password54321 on 3/16/24, 12:11 PM

    And another outage a day later: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68584235

    I can't even use an app from my Gym without it lagging / crashing. Many of us predicted this was going to start happening at an increasing rate because of AI and the over-saturation of under-qualified students with CS degrees. It is going to be a bad decade for software.

  • by ChrisArchitect on 3/15/24, 1:37 PM