Man Creates Website that Tracks Broken McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines

A German software engineer developed a website that displays a map of McDonald’s ice cream machines and tells whether they are broken or working. Rashiq Zahid created the website, named McBroken, after not being able to order a McDonald’s sundae in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district because the ice cream machine was out of order. Over the summer, he created McBroken by making bots that can place an ice cream order at every restaurant in the country through the McDonald's app. If the ice cream machine is broken, the bot will not be able to add any ice cream to its cart and a red dot will appear on the map. A green dot, on the other hand, indicates that the bot successfully added ice cream and the machine is working. After he got McBroken up and running, Zahid tested it in Germany, which has around 1,500 McDonald’s restaurants. He used the website to check the ice cream machines in Berlin. Then, he confirmed if the results were correct by visiting the stores one by one. He found that his website’s results matched the status of the fast-food chain’s ice cream machine every time. Zahid then decided to test McBroken in the US, where McDonald’s has almost 10,000 locations. Within minutes after launching, the website received 10,000 visits, causing it to lag and eventually crash. Zahid had to troubleshoot the website for an hour to ensure it ran smoothly again. McBroken became so popular that even David Tovar, McDonald’s Vice President of communications and government relations in the US, visited the website. In a tweet, he thanked Zahid for going out of his way to help customers and called him a true McDonald’s fan.