McDonald's Closes Amid Global IT Outage | Hacker News Reader

McDonald's Closes Amid Global IT Outage

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84 pointsytch74 comments

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.

On the other hand, I lived in NYC for a long time and was always surprised at how European travelers wound up eating at McDconalds in Chinatown, surrounded by amazing food.

I concluded that humans are very conservative when factoring “lunch risk”. The perceived cost of time, money, and disappointment if they don’t find food they like drives them to McDonalds where they know exactly what they are getting and the risk is zero.

A Swiss acquaintance of mine was the first to show me how this works first-hand. Lemongrass chicken? Congee? Pho? Let’s just get “a Mac”.

Yeah, McDonald's and friends have had no general need to close their places because of lack of customers in Europe.

Counting locations I think compared to other kinds of restaurants their market share is small. Measured in turnover it might be a different story. Few people might enjoy their meal at a McDonald's for 30-60 minutes.

I'll have a slightly different take on this -- I suspect quite a bit of this might be a form of a "when in Rome" effect. I'm an immigrant myself, and the number of family members for whom going to a "original" McDonald's (and by original all that is meant is a mcdonalds in the land of where mcdonalds is from) is actually a thing. I suspect a significant portion of the folks who do go in as tourists are either in the "well this is just a quick bite that i know what I'll get cause we need to get to X place on time" or the "OMG A REAL* MCDONALDS" types for whom going to one in the US is an experience itself. Whereas we locals might recognize that perhaps the wealth of coming to somewhere like NYC is the incredible offerings available, I know for quite a few folks that the blander fast food experience actually may be the "novelty" they are seeking out!

Heck - I live in the Midwest and when I'm on the West Coast, I like to stop at Jack in the Box!

It's not that surprising. A lot of people travel for experiences other than food. Eating is just something that gets in the way of doing what they really want to do, and so a quick, safe burger is all they need before hopping to the next stop in their itinerary. Nothing wrong with that.

It's something that's even more severe if you're traveling in more rural areas, where the non-chain food places are a lot more hit-or-miss (and can have awkward hours like just not being open at 14:00). Chains like McDonald's have a general predictable consistency, which is especially valuable if you've got kids in the prime picky eater phase who are unwilling to try anything they don't know.

OTOH, I'm actually somewhat interested in visiting McDonald's once in foreign countries because their menus aren't consistent across the world but rather somewhat adapted to the local tastes.

The McDonald's at the HQ in Chicago at least used to have a rotating global menu (but I can't been there since the pandemic, so don't know if they still do that). It's also hilarious because it's on Randolph St in West loop (aka "restaurant row")

Yes. I'm far more likely to visit a major fast food chain in another country for this exact reason. It's like a fun little mashup of the familiar and the pseudo-exotic.

A big attraction of the chain for me is that the servers don't have a personal stake in the success of the restaurant. At smaller or more local places, the owners are working, and they really care. I just want to eat without dancing around their feelings.

When travelling I choose fast food from a big chain like McDonald's only because it carries the lowest probability of food poisoning as the first meal in a new place - I suppose many adopted the same approach.

Ironically the first time I had food poisoning abroad was the morning after a mcdonalds in NYC.

Why do you think you risk food poisoning by eating at a local restaurant just because it is in another country? Do you think the locals are worried about food poisoning eating there?

Honestly I find this “I’m risking my safety unless it is a US chain” attitude both limiting and even a little ugly.

To be fair, the parent never mentioned traveling in another country. The strategy works equally well while traveling within one’s own country.

If your digestive system tends to have you issues when given unexpected inputs, as is the case for a lot of people, then this is just what you do to stay comfortable while away from home.

> To be fair, the parent never mentioned traveling in another country.

Yep totally missed that, making my comment a little off base. The rest of the thread was about traveling abroad but not the person I replied to.

> Why do you think you risk food poisoning by eating at a local restaurant just because it is in another country

I think you are investing too heavily in the 'poisoning' term. It wouldn't be per se, but it wouldn't help you if the next day you would feel extremely not good.

> Do you think the locals are worried about food poisoning eating there?

Locals have local gut bacteria and immune systems tuned to the local strains of pathogens. It's no revelation that if you travel far enough, there's going to be some level of incompatibility here.

> Honestly I find this “I’m risking my safety unless it is a US chain” attitude both limiting and even a little ugly.

No idea where you got this from, but I guess you assumed that I'm American and have a specific set of beliefs you observed in other Americans.

To be clear I'm not American and I don't prefer US chains. If I went to Saudi Arabia I would probably go to Hungry Bunny - even if only due to nostalgia.

demographics and "long tail analysis" would tell a different story. It was your eyes that counted one population, at McDonalds. There is no direct, countable evidence to your eyes, how many meals were eaten by what people and how often, at the hundreds of food places nearby.

I didn't say all European travelers eat at McDonalds. I'm sure many, many travelers are far more adventurous and eat like Anthony Bourdain.

But I still find it remarkable that McDonalds strikes such a chord with people, particularly people like my Swiss friend who is as cultured and sophisticated as they come. If we were choosing a film, he'd want to see the most difficult, obscure documentary. But choosing lunch - there's just something about the fear of a bad culinary experience that trumps all other concerns.

McDonald's has locations all over the world for a good reason.

> always surprised at how European travelers wound up eating at McDconalds in Chinatown, surrounded by amazing food.

My kids were part of a group that recently hosted another school group from Europe. As they were leaving, we asked them about the experience. One of the kids said that it was comforting to find out that America also has McDonalds, and many other kids shook their head in agreement.

There is same phenomenon with music :-)

McDonalds' product, someone in that business explained to me, is consistency: You can get the exact same food in any town, in any country, at any time. (Also, it's availability, as they have prime location and usually are nearby.)

It's pretty impressive from a business and logistics perspective. Imagine delivering the exact same physical object, which is perishable and must be locally prepared, everywhere in the world. That's a different challenge than your cloud app's capacity.

That's one reason for me not going there, it's boring food. But obviously enough people like boring.

Internationally there is quite some variation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_availability_o...

I like McDonald’s because I know there’ll always be a bathroom

A couple of years ago I went into one in Stockholm for only that reason. Only to find out that it required coins I did not have.

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...

You call it the "core business", but is it? Isn't McDonald's core business real estate?

https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...

They still need to make sure the restaurants on top of them are generating money. Otherwise they'd just build self-storage units on each one.

Not really. All they have to ensure is that enough people hope to succeed at franchising that they keep pulling in money.

Quiznos literally sucked their franchise owners dry, but it took a while.

Subway has been extracting wealth from their franchise owners since the very inception of the "$5 footlong" and they're still around.

They don't _have_ to but they'll make more money and their share of additional income will be close to 100%.

Massive IT failures like this are even worse for attracting franchisees though. People won't stop buying burgers today out of fear that they'll have to buy burgers elsewhere tomorrow.

You can bet that the franchise fees won't be pro-rated. That explains all of this.

It's not in their culture. I worked for a number of equipment suppliers for years and their mode of operation was more like a small government. Send out RFPs, inspect and test the prototypes from various companies, vote on the best ones, deploy. I can't imagine it's any different for their IT. Their expertise is in supply chain integration. Oh wait, that's HAVI.

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.

Even hospitals outsource some core infrastructure to the cloud. Cut the internet connection and suddenly they're in the 80s.

worse, in the 80s, hospitals would know how to work without internet access.

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.

I think one of the value propositions / moats / benefit of scale (nowadays) for a mega corp like McDonald's is that the cost of e.g the kiosk software is spread over so tremendously many restaurants.

Even if they do follow local regulations and have mostly "isolated deployments" of things touching customer data, they might still have things like a centralised DNS server or update server for kiosk/POS software etc.

I would be pretty surprised if anno 2024 an organisation like McDonald's had regional independent SWE/Ops teams building essentially the same thing but for their region.

Megacorp and megacorp. Here they are small franchises, not owned by McDonald's.

Of course using basically the same kiosk software makes sense despite being different localisations and different business owners. Having single points of failure globally not so much. I wonder how business owners take functioning sea cables for granted. We have wars in several places on the planet.

A significant number of McDonalds locations in the US are owned by the McDonalds corporation, not franchisees. And McDonalds wields a heavy hand in "encouraging" franchisees to participate in whatever program they're currently running or implementing. This goes from food introductions, to hardware, to back of the office programs.

Of course that's a core of franchising: Limiting the choice of business owners. They have to source your stuff even if choices more suitable for them might exist.

Why is data protection an issue & what would be a violation? If I walk into one of their establishments & order a burger, the store has zero idea who I am. I just pay, get an order ID & stand there and wait. I don't have to login. There's no PII.

Did you pay cash?

What's that got to do with anything? Card details aren't stored.

Is there no trace of you sending money from your card to McDonalds ? How do they audit for fraud ?

It's stored by your bank but your credit card or account id is never transferred to the retailer by the payment processors instead what happens is that McDonalds get an unique transaction ID that only your card provider knows was generated by your card.

So how do they know it was me who sent the money and not some McDonalds money launderer ?

McDonald's don't your bank does know you authorized an transaction using pin/card/app.

The payment terminal is essentially not actually talking directly to the POS except to tell it that transaction id "xyz"(which only your bank/"card issuer" know is you) was approved, everything else is encrypted between terminal and payment processor and not supposed to be visible to the retailer.

Yours arent, but other people's are when they agree.

Many retail chains I've gone to have the capability to look up your entire purchase history via a credit card, or to refund a purchase to the card that was used.

I don't know if they store the card details directly or if they store a hash, but they certainly have a way to tie your credit card to the video of your face leaving the store and (most likely) a video of your license plate as you drive away.

Sell that to a data broker (as they certainly do in the US) and someone could potentially purchase a history of what you bought anywhere and when.

I've had that experience too. I assume they use your card details to find your internal customer identifier or something and then discard the card details.

Don't they have to maintain that mapping to keep it available?

You don't have to, but you may: ordering via app, collecting loyalty points as well as PII of the staff.

There appeared to be different apps for different countries last I looked in the App Store

What does that tell about the backend system? - Nothing.

Also last time I went to auch a place they asked me for a loyalty thingy even when not ordering by app.

They're aggressively herding people into the behavior of ordering through an app, to the point (people have told me) of charging higher prices if you walk in and pay.

I keep expecting them to remove the 20% discount, but it's available every time.

I don't know how common it is nationwide, but around here, McDonald's and most Chipotles won't take orders at the register. McDonalds will direct you to the kiosk and at Chipotle, if you don't have a phone or tablet to order online, then you're SOL.

Been like that ever since COVID lockdown.

Kiosks I don't mind, you can still order anonymously. I just won't use an app or web site I have to maintain an account on.

This reminds me of the danger of centralizing without safeguards. Like the time Google was able to fat-finger a network change globally. Similar to writing testable code, config changes should be able to be rolled out incrementally, especially if it's not easily revertable. Otherwise don't over-centralize--you have to be this tall to ride this ride.

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.

Until it isn't, though. When the thing you are selling is essentially a commodity, when the business model only works because you are balancing some crazy thing margins that rely on all the other gizmos to make work, when the tech supplants the most minimal staff (which is largely seasonal, unskilled, and poorly paid) possible to even keep the lights out, suddenly the fact that this went a bit sideways becomes a big, big problem. It's not like a mom and pop diner who all of a suddenly can't use the handheld CC system.

In 2024, if you can only take cash, you might as well close down until you sort out CC processing.

Where I live we still have restaurants that only take cash. There are even two places nearby where you can walk in 24/7, grab what you want out of their fridge, and put your cash in a box on the way out. Cash only can still work.

Where I live those fridges and the cash box would both be empty in a matter of hours.

Now imagine that instead of a local restaurant, it was a global conglomerate with restaurants in nearly every country

Look at the date on the article below. McDonald's grew into a global conglomerate well before they started accepting cards.

https://money.cnn.com/2002/11/26/news/companies/mcdonalds/

unless you realize how much logistics happens to keep ingredients arriving on an Just in time basis and keep track of every little QA data-points so crucial to the fast food chain employee experience.

Cutting that $1,- off the average meal bill that allows McDonald's to sell their francises deals as more profitable then being independent depends on both the reality and perception of it being an integrated system, so there is every incentive to make the IT system as global and pervasive as possible.

Seems like custom printed burgers would be a cool gimmick if they can get the render time down.

There's probably not a single person in that restaurant with an authority to make a decision like that.

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...

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.

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39713489

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