It’s something you don’t want to hear when you have a hankering for an Oreo McFlurry.
“The ice cream machine is down.”
Instead of wasting a trip to a McDonald’s with your heart set on an ice cream treat only to be let down, a 24-year-old software developer made a website — McBroken.com — to let customers know which locations of the fast-food restaurant to avoid because of broken machines.
The Verge reported that developer Rashiq Zahid came up with the idea after trekking to a McDonald’s in Berlin to order a sundae from a touch screen menu at one location, only to see it wasn’t available.
He made McBroken.com in response, using information from the McDonald’s app after some trial and error.
“I reverse engineered mcdonald’s internal api and I’m currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every mcdonald’s in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine,” Zahid tweeted Thursday afternoon.
Of course, Zahid said, he is not actually ordering ice cream at each location, only placing orders to determine whether or not ice cream is available through the official app every 30 minutes. He doesn’t follow through and confirm the orders.
On the website is a map of all McDonald’s locations. Green dots mean ice cream is available. Red dots mean it’s not. There’s a column to the right of the site showing percentages of broken machines, which is ranked nationally and by cities.
Zahid told The Verge he initially made the website as a joke.
“I just made it for fun,” he said. “But people were like, ’Wow, this is the best thing I’ve seen this entire week.'”
Not only has it gotten attention from McDonald’s customers, but David Tovar, McDonald’s VP of US Communications, tweeted about it Thursday evening.
“Only a true @McDonalds fan would go to these lengths to help customers get our delicious ice cream!” he wrote.
“This made my day - thanks for being such a great sport about this!!” Zahid replied.
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