There’s nothing more devastating than rolling up to the McDonald’s for a McFlurry and having the machine be “down for cleaning” (we actually already covered this surprisingly intense process here).
We know that the ice cream machine’s cleaning cycle protects us from harmful bacteria, but that doesn’t take away the disappointment we feel while ordering in the drive-thru. Luckily, we live in the 21st century, and we have web apps like as McBroken to fill in the gap.
Track ice cream possibilities in real time.
Engineer Rashiq Zahid has created a real-time tracker for McDonald’s ice cream machines. When you visit McBroken, you’ll see a map highlighting every McDonald’s location in your area. Each location is marked with a red or green dot, indicating the working status of the ice cream machine.
McBroken works by reverse engineering McDonald’s internal API, which allows Zahid to queue up around $18,000 of ice cream orders across all U.S. McDonald’s every minute. If a product can’t be added to his cart at a specific location, that particular McDonald’s gets the red dot. Don’t go there if you’re hoping for a McFlurry. Simple enough, right?
Yes, McBroken really works.
Don’t worry—no orders are going through, no ice cream is being wasted, and no workers are being tormented by giant reoccurring orders.
to clarify how this works: mcdonald’s keeps track which locations have a broken machine, I’m merely querying for those – no order gets executed, no ice cream is actually wasted
— rashiq (@rashiq) October 22, 2020
There’s even a statistics bar on the right side of the screen showing the percentage of “downed” machines in various cities.
Be sure to consult McBroken the next time you’re headed out for a McFlurry or sundae. You won’t get drive-thru disappointment, and if a worker does try to tell you that the ice cream machine is down, you can call them a big, ugly liar (note: Don’t actually do this).
