Earlier this month, McDonald’s experienced a systemwide tech outage in several of the company’s global markets, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan and Hong Kong. Although the company clarified that the IT outage was not a result of a cybersecurity threat, it took much of the day to fix and get mobile ordering and kiosks back online.
Then, a couple of weeks later, on March 24, Panera Bread also experienced a “massive tech outage” that impacted online ordering, POS systems, and in-store kiosks, as first reported by Silicon Valley Daily, though the company was not as forthcoming as McDonald’s had been about the cause, and Reddit users in the Panera community speculated that it could be a cyberattack of some kind.
Although few details were revealed about either the McDonald’s or Panera outages, the reality is that widespread IT outage can affect operators of any size, and restaurants need to deploy resources from preventing (as much as they can) these issues from happening in the first place.