People are spending up to 3 hours waiting in drive-thru lines for McDonald's and Burger King as the chains reopen locations around the world

• Fast-food chains around the world are drawing long lines as they reopen.
• Burger King reopened its first UK location on Thursday, causing a gridlock in the town of Havant in Hampshire.
• On April 22 in France, customers waited up to three hours to order from a McDonald's restaurant's drive thru after it reopened.
• In New Zealand on Wednesday, police were called for crowd control after customers overwhelmed a BurgerFuel restaurant in Auckland.
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Burger King reopened its first UK location on Thursday after shutting down all locations in the country due to the coronavirus pandemic.

When the restaurant opened at noon, lines of cars already snaked around the block, clogging the streets of the small town of Havant in Hampshire, according to a report in the UK's Metro. A Hampshire resident told the Metro that he saw a steady stream of cars all day with a spike in traffic around dinnertime.

As fast-food chains reopen restaurants around the world, customers are flocking back to drive-thrus in hordes. In France during late April, customers waited up to three hours to order at a McDonald's restaurant in an Île de France town after it reopened, according to the French news outlet Le Parisien.

Twitter users posted photos and videos of long lines and clogged roads as more McDonald's restaurants reopened across the country. One Twitter user wrote in French, "People understand nothing! We are going towards our doom. Why is [McDonald's] already loosening things up? Unacceptable!"

In an earnings call attended by Business Insider, McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski said that the chain had seen unprecedented enthusiasm at reopenings around the world.

"You may have seen, in the last week, as we've opened up in a few of these markets we had a three-hour wait at one of our restaurants, in France, for people to get through the drive-thru," Kempczinski told investors and reporters on the call. "In Austria, we had a two-mile line of people looking to get into the drive-thru."

This week in New Zealand, police were forced to intervene when crowds got out of hand for the reopening of an Auckland location of BurgerFuel, a New Zealand-based burger chain with 88 restaurants around the world. There were also long lines at KFC and McDonald's as those chains reopened in New Zealand as well. Some stores even ran out of food after being overwhelmed by eager customers.