McDonald’s in Australia says its restaurants are back online after a technical glitch saw stores around the world closed for hours on Friday night.

McDonald’s Chicago-based head office apologised for the global technology outage saying it was caused by a third-party technology provider and was not a cybersecurity issue.

A post from Australia’s “Team Macca’s” late Friday night confirmed the technology outage had been resolved.

“All Macca’s restaurants have now re-opened,” the post on X (formerly Twitter) read.

“A huge thanks again to our wonderful customers and hard-working crew for your patience and support.”

Tweet from @maccas

The issue appeared to have started after 4pm local time and also affected McDonalds stores around the world, including the UK, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Japan, Denmark, Italy and Thailand.

The company said the glitch occurred during a configuration change.

“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.