TOKYO, March 15 Reuters Some McDonald39;s stores were back online after a technology outage on Friday disrupted operations for a few hours at many of the restaurant chain39;s outlets worldwide.

The fast food giant ruled out the possibility of a cybersecurity incident and said the tech issue was being resolved, after its restaurants in countries including Japan, UK, Canada and Australia faced outages earlier in the day.

McDonald39;s declined to comment on the number of stores impacted.

Many of its stores in Japan had stopped taking inperson and mobile customer orders because of the system disruption. A spokesperson at McDonald39;s Holdings Company Japan said recovery work was in progress and operations were resuming at some stores.

The company39;s outlets in the UK and Ireland were fully back online after the outage, it said, while McDonald39;s Australia said most of its restaurants had reopened.

The restaurant chain has about 40,000 outlets worldwide, with more than 14,000 stores in the United States.

The outage seemed to be have affected customers in Hong Kong and New Zealand as well, with people taking to social media to complain about disruptions at stores.

Earlier this month, Metaowned Facebook and Instagram also faced technical issues that disrupted global services for hundreds of thousands of users for more than two hours.

Reporting by Kantaro Komiya and Kiyoshi Takenaka in Tokyo, Shubham Kalia, Harshita Meenaktshi and Rishav Chatterjee in Bengalaru, Muvija…