From the article –

McDonald’s was hit by a system failure Friday that closed restaurants and disrupted online and app orders around the world, including in the United States, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.

  • Daqu@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    More than 20 ice cream machines were working at the same time. This caused a buffer overlow that crashed the McDatabase in the McCloud.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    My question is why are the systems designed to be dependent to upstream services 24/7? Wouldn’t a better approach be to have systems that can run disconnected, then simply upload/replicate data when a connection returns?

    These are franchises, right?

    I deployed such POS (Point of Sale) systems in the late 90’s, because connectivity wasn’t ubiquitous then. They were designed so franchises could upload/replicate however you needed: continuously, when a connection was available, on a schedule, etc. Some places had pooled telephone lines to achieve the needed throughput.

    I get the mobile ordering being impacted, but why would you tie the local kiosk to a web service?

    • NocturnalEngineer@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Didn’t you hear? The future is the cloud!

      Why host stuff locally when you can host it on someone else’s computer, and have fun, exciting, and completely foreseeable failures like this…

      The internet is now just AWS, Azure, GCP and Cloudflare.

    • danhab99@programming.dev
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      9 months ago

      There are many considerations where the fault lines should be. Somethings absolutely need upstream support and cannot just be buffered… for example payment processing.

      Shit happens and we DevOps people do everything we can to minimize it. That’s why your apps might go down for like 2hrs a year.

      • isles@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        for example payment processing.

        (I wonder how many even know what this thing is)

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    9 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    In the UK, Maria Avram, who works at a McDonald’s restaurant in London, told CNN that there was a system outage between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. local time (2 a.m. and 3 a.m.

    McDonald’s Hong Kong said on Facebook: “Due to a computer system failure, the mobile ordering and self-ordering kiosks are not functioning.

    Taiwanese broadcaster TVBS cited McDonald’s Taiwan as saying Friday that some of its eateries, as well as McDelivery, were temporarily unable to conduct transactions due to internet disruptions.

    Of the other countries known to be affected, Japan has the largest number of McDonald’s restaurants — nearly 3,000 — followed by the UK, with close to 1,500 stores, and Australia, with just over 1,000.

    During its latest earnings presentation last month, the company said the war in the Middle East was hurting its business and would likely continue to do so.

    Chief executive Christopher Kempczinski said McDonald’s was also seeing some negative impact on sales in other Muslim countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.


    The original article contains 474 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      This summary had me confused. I misread and thought, “wow japan has the most mcdonalds restaurants in the world?” Then i realised it said “of the other countries affected”. USA has 14.5k mcdonalds… wow.