Big Mac goes big tech, but with a few hiccups

WHEN MCDONALD'S, OPENS new tab first opened for business in the 1940s, its workers stood at physical counters, its burgers and fries were listed on papermenus, and its customers paid cash to its human cashiers.

Today technology so infuses every aspect of McDonald's business that it would only be a slight exaggeration to call it a tech company that happens to sell burgers.

McDonald's mobile app; its human-less,order-taking kiosks; its digitised menus that change based on trends, the weather and more; and even its generative AI -together, these enable McDonald's to eke out additional sales and efficiencies worth billions of dollars to the company, which has 40,000 locations in roughly 100 countries.

Yet that same tech can also bring McDonald's to its knees. This week, system outages plagued McDonald's locations across some of its biggest global markets, including Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom, forcing many stores to temporarily take only cash or shut down entirely. McDonald's hasn't disclosed howwidespread the outages were,but on Friday afternoon, 12 hours after the outages were first reported, a franchise in San Antonio, Texas wouldn't accept orders in its app and couldn't accept cash.