All McDonald’s restaurants across Australia have re-opened after a massive international systems outage affected multiple parts of the global business, including payments.

The company’s Australian arm issued a statement this morning.

“We are happy to confirm all of our Australian restaurants are back online and serving our customers. Notably, the issue was not related to a cybersecurity event,” a spokesperson said.

“We thank our customers for their patience and look forward to serving them in our restaurants again.”

The fast food giant said the outage was caused by a third-party technology provider and was not a cybersecurity issue.

Tech expert Trevor Long told Weekend Today it was nonetheless a “major IT issue”.

“What I would say that means is somewhere in the network, a routing issue has stopped all traffic on the McDonalds network, which has affected point of sale,” he said.

“Every part of the business, including their back office systems.”

It started around midnight local time (4pm AEDT) during a configuration change and was close to being resolved about 12 hours later, the Chicago-based company said.

“Reliability and stability of our technology are a priority, and I know how frustrating it can be when there are outages. I understand that this impacts you, your restaurant teams and our customers,” Brian Rice, the company’s global chief information officer, said in a statement.

“What happened today has been an exception to the norm, and we are working with absolute urgency to resolve it. Thank you for your patience, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience this has caused,” the statement added.

The company said the outage also wasn’t related to its shift to Google Cloud as a technology provider.

In December, McDonald’s announced a multi-year partnership with Google that will move restaurant computations from servers into the cloud. The partnership is designed to speed up tasks like ordering at kiosks and to help managers optimise staffing.

Many outlets across Australia were unable to take payments or orders from 4.30pm, and many were still experiencing issues about 8.30pm.

Earlier, 9news.com.au was able to confirm many stores unable to serve customers, including at Bondi Junction and Sylvania in Sydney, as well as in Melbourne and Perth.

“She’s telling people who are trying to use the machine that the systems are down so they won’t be able to see their orders come through.”

The outage appeared to be affecting point of sale systems, as well as the systems used within the store to transmit orders.

One McDonald’s worker in Sydney who spoke to 9news.com.au confirmed that their screens had shut down and staff at the restaurant were taking orders in cash.

Staff at the Stanmore location said they were writing orders down on paper.

Another store in Bondi Junction reported at 6.50pm that their systems were working again, but other stores were still down.

By 7pm some stores in Melbourne and Sydney reported that their point of sale systems were functioning, with only the internal screens unable to display information.

Stores in Japan and New Zealand were also reported to be affected by a technology issue.

Media outlets in the Netherlands reported that branches there were also closed.

There have also been reports of outages in the UK and the US.

In an update about 9pm, McDonald’s said the issue was “being resolved”.

“We thank customers for their patience and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. Notably, the issue is not related to a cybersecurity event.

“We can confirm some restaurants are back online and serving customers, and we are continuing to work to restore all remaining restaurants as soon as possible.”

Earlier it had described the incident as “a technology outage”.

Earlier Friday, McDonald’s in Japan posted on X, formerly Twitter, that “operations are temporarily out at many of our stores nationwide,” calling it “a system failure.”

In Hong Kong, the chain said on Facebook that a “computer system failure” knocked out orders online and through self-serve kiosks.

Downdetector, an outage tracker, also reported a spike in problems with the McDonald’s app over several hours.

Some McDonald’s restaurants internationally were operating normally again after the outage, with people ordering and getting their food at locations in Bangkok, Milan and London.

A worker at a restaurant in Bangkok said the system was down for about an hour, making it impossible to take online or credit card payments but allowing it to still accept cash for orders.

At another location in Thailand’s capital, there was plywood over a door with a sign saying, “Technicians are updating the system,” even as customers were ordering again and paying digitally.

A worker at a Milan restaurant noted that the system was offline for a couple of hours and a technician walked them through getting it back up and running.

A spokesperson for McDonald’s in Denmark said the “technology failure” was resolved there and its restaurants were open.