Find a McDonald’s with a Working Ice Cream Machine Using McBroken
Craving a hot fudge sundae from McDonald’s but don’t want to make the trip because you know there’s a good chance the ice cream machine is broken? Hey, it happens. But now there’s a solution: McBroken.com, a website that enables you to conduct a search on which locations near you have working — or broken — ice cream machines.
The site may be a little on the clunky side to use, with buttons focusing on major markets and a map that can be manipulated to find your market rather than a traditional search engine. But it’s not too tough to find a red or green dot, click on it, and see which restaurant has working or non-working ice cream machines.
The first question I had when a friend turned me onto McBroken, was, “How the heck does this person know?” I mean, there are more than 13,000 McDonald’s locations in the U.S. alone.
Well, if you click on the link that reads, “How does McBroken work?”, you are redirected to a 2020 tweet by an “infrastructure engineer” who goes by Rashiq. In the tweet he says he reverse-engineered the McDonald's internal ordering API (application programming interface). Rashiq adds, “I'm currently placing an order for a McSundae every minute at every McDonald's location in the U.S. to figure out which ones have a broken ice cream machine[s].”
Hilarious AND useful. In another tweet, Rashiq admits, “I'm sorry, McDonald's data analyst, I'm afraid I'm ruining your entire mobile conversion metrics for my own personal amusement.”
He got a lot of skepticism and questions, but he says via his Twitter feed that the orders are immediately canceled and that no ice cream is wasted. It’s truly a troll with a public service attached to it. Brilliant.
