We've all heard the jokes, seen the countless memes on the internet, and indeed experienced the crushing disappointment firsthand of realizing the ice cream machine in your local McDonald's is broken.
Until now it has been a frustrating and seemingly insurmountable problem. Until now, we've just had to walk out of the McDonald's with our tail between our legs and no milkshake/ ice cream/ other frozen treat to enjoy.
Sure, you could settle for an apple pie and call it a day, or you could use genius new website mcbroken.com, which tracks McDonald's restaurants to give you the information you need on which sites have out-of-order ice cream machines.
Mcbroken is the brainchild of Rashiq Zahid, per the Verge.
"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," the software engineer wrote on Twitter, alongside a link to the website.
Essentially, the site shows a map of every McDonald's location in the United States, denoted by clusters of dots. Locations in which the ice cream machines are working are given a green dot, while those with out-of-order machines are given a red dot.
As most of us probably don't have a clue what reverse engineering an internal API actually means in practice, in essence mcbroken works by acting as a bot that tests the availability of ice cream sundaes at every McDonald's location every 30 minutes.
If the app fails to add an ice cream sundae to the cart at a particular location, it is given a red dot on the map.
David Tovar, McDonald's Vice President of US Communications and Government Relations, responded favorably to the site on Twitter, writing, "Only a true @McDonalds fan would go to these lengths to help customers get our delicious ice cream! So, thanks! We know we have some opportunities to consistently satisfy even more customers with sweet treats and we will."
“I just made it for fun,” said Zahid told the Verge. “But people were like ‘Wow, this is the best thing I’ve seen this entire week.’”