From the article –

McDonald’s was hit by a system failure Friday that closed restaurants and disrupted online and app orders around the world, including in the United States, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    My question is why are the systems designed to be dependent to upstream services 24/7? Wouldn’t a better approach be to have systems that can run disconnected, then simply upload/replicate data when a connection returns?

    These are franchises, right?

    I deployed such POS (Point of Sale) systems in the late 90’s, because connectivity wasn’t ubiquitous then. They were designed so franchises could upload/replicate however you needed: continuously, when a connection was available, on a schedule, etc. Some places had pooled telephone lines to achieve the needed throughput.

    I get the mobile ordering being impacted, but why would you tie the local kiosk to a web service?

    • NocturnalEngineer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      8 months ago

      Didn’t you hear? The future is the cloud!

      Why host stuff locally when you can host it on someone else’s computer, and have fun, exciting, and completely foreseeable failures like this…

      The internet is now just AWS, Azure, GCP and Cloudflare.

    • danhab99
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      8 months ago

      There are many considerations where the fault lines should be. Somethings absolutely need upstream support and cannot just be buffered… for example payment processing.

      Shit happens and we DevOps people do everything we can to minimize it. That’s why your apps might go down for like 2hrs a year.

      • isles@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        8 months ago

        for example payment processing.

        (I wonder how many even know what this thing is)