McDonald's investigates payments outage, dLocal shuffles C-suite

A global systems outage froze services including ordering and payments across thousands of McDonald's locations in various countries on March 15, according to a company press release. The outage reportedly affected stores in Australia, China, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany and the U.S. for several hours. The incident marked the third high-profile U.S. corporate payments system outage within the last year, underscoring business risk exposure when centralized digital payment systems are impaired.

A day later, the McDonald's digital ordering and payment systems were back online, the company said in a second press release on March 16. "In the coming days, we will be analyzing the issue and pushing for accountability across our teams and third-party vendors," said Brian Rice, McDonald's executive vice president and global chief information officer, in the release. In the company's annual report, filed Feb. 22, McDonald's had said it was committing to improving its service model through mobile ordering and payments systems. 

JPMorgan Chase in July 2023 experienced an outage that disrupted U.S. transactions riding on the bank consortium-owned Zelle peer-to-peer transfer app, and two months later, Block's Square and Cash App systems were rocked by an outage that prevented millions of sellers from accepting payments for about 15 hours. The incident hurt Block's quarterly profits by less than 1%, but within weeks the company's CEO Alyssa Henry announced her departure after nearly a decade heading the firm. Square founder Jack Dorsey subsequently resumed the role of CEO at Block and Square, where he's overseeing improvements to corporate systems.

McDonald's was the first quick-service chain to roll out self-ordering kiosks on a global scale, beginning with tests of the concept in 2003. By 2015, the fast-food chain began installing self-service kiosks widely, reaching all 4,000 U.S. stores by 2020. The firm reportedly saw a 6% increase in U.S. sales in stores equipped with self-service kiosks, due to their greater efficiency and accuracy. Simultaneously, McDonald's has added self-ordering kiosks across Europe and Asia so they now extend to the majority of the company's 40,000 stores worldwide. —Kate Fitzgerald

Uruguay-based cross-border payments processor dLocal announced leadership changes that include co-CEO Sebastian Kanovich stepping down to be a board member and head of the commercial and M&A committee, leaving Pedro Arndt as the firm's sole CEO. The firm also named Mark Ortiz, an executive who previously worked at General Electric, as its new chief financial officer, replacing Diego Cabrera Canay. Veronica Raffo, a lawyer, also joined dLocal's board as an independent member. dLocal processes payments for 40 million consumers and has handled transactions for more than 3 million freelancers. The personnel moves come less than a year after dLocal shuffled other top executives as it repositioned for international expansion. —Kate Fitzgerald

London-based fintech Revolut has rolled out a device based on an iPad enabling businesses in the hospitality industry to accept cards at the point of sale and manage other aspects of their businesses, Finextra reports. The device can help restaurant managers track sales and inventory trends and offers 24-hour settlement of funds. The move pits Revolut, which launched in the U.K. in 2015 and in the U.S. in 2020, against Square and PayPal's iZettle, according to reports. Revolut claims to have 840,000 U.S. customers. —Kate Fitzgerald