It wasn't me!

Late last week McDonalds found itself unable to serve burgers in many of its outlets because of a system outage. Now, I know that the inability to buy a burger is hardly critical national infrastructure stuff, but this is one of the world’s biggest corporations. And the outage affected a number of countries including the UK, Japan, Australia amongst others - the corporation called it a ‘global technology system outage’. 

What caught my eye in the statement issued by McDonalds was that they blamed a “third-party provider during a configuration change”. They went on to say that “In the coming days, we will be analyzing the issue and pushing for accountability across our teams and third-party vendors.” It sounds like a statement designed to dodge the blame rather than take full responsibility. You could argue that this approach indicates a global brand that has little or no control over its outsourcers. The statement begs a number of questions, such as “why does it take a major outage for you to push for accountability?” Or maybe “What if you had poisoned a number of customers? Would you then start pushing for accountability over third parties and food traceability?” Fox Business explains that the outage ”...underscores the fast-food giant's growing reliance on tech systems that are becoming increasingly common in the food service industry”. 

Most organisations experience failures from time to time, either of their own making or caused by third-parties. But if your name is on the front of the shop shouldn’t you be taking full responsibility?