Asia Tech Wire (July 23) -- McDonald's Japan said on Tuesday that it has now reopened almost all of its stores that were forced to suspend operations due to problems with its payment system.

A small number of stores were still closed as of 12:00 noon on the same day, but will reopen when they are ready, the company said.

McDonald's Japan said the problem was not related to a global IT outage triggered by a software update from U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.