‘System failure’ shutters some restaurants for hours, leading to complaints from customers on social media.

Fast food giant McDonald’s has experienced systems failures in several countries that led to some of its restaurants being shuttered for hours, but ruled out cybersecurity issues as a potential cause of the problem.

The United States-based chain said the “technology outage” on Friday affected operations in outlets around the world, including Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom.

McDonald’s in Japan wrote on X that “operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide” and called the incident a “system failure”.

Patrik Hjelte, owner of several McDonald’s restaurants in central Sweden, told local newspaper Nya Wermlands Tidningen that all of the chain’s “restaurants are connected to a global network and that is what’s messed up”.

It was not immediately clear how many stores were affected globally.

Outage tracking website Downdetector reported a spike in problems with the McDonald’s app, while media outlets reported that customers from Australia to the UK had complained of issues with ordering.

The fast food chain has about 40,000 restaurants worldwide, with more than 14,000 stores in the US.

In February, it reported that it had missed its first quarterly sales target in nearly four years, citing Israel’s war on Gaza as a factor.

The slump came after customers in Muslim-majority countries called for a boycott of the chain in response to its Israeli franchisee donating thousands of free meals to the Israeli military.

Earlier this month, Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram also faced technical issues that disrupted global services for hundreds of thousands of users for more than two hours.