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This app will tell you if the local McDonald's ice cream machine is broken

No excuses, McDonald's. The data says you have ice cream.

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abrar-al-heeti2
Abrar Al-Heeti Video producer / CNET
Abrar Al-Heeti is a video host and producer for CNET, with an interest in internet trends, entertainment, pop culture and digital accessibility. Before joining the video team, she was a writer for CNET's culture team. She graduated with bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Though Illinois is home, she now loves San Francisco -- steep inclines and all.
Expertise Abrar has spent her career at CNET breaking down the latest trends on TikTok, Twitter and Instagram, while also reporting on diversity and inclusion initiatives in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Credentials
  • Named a Tech Media Trailblazer by the Consumer Technology Association in 2019, a winner of SPJ NorCal's Excellence in Journalism Awards in 2022 and has three times been a finalist in the LA Press Club's National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards.
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Abrar Al-Heeti
McDonald's ice cream

Get the scoop on whether ice cream's available at your local Mickey D's.

 Getty Images

We all know the heartbreak of wanting nothing more than a cheap ice cream cone from McDonald's, only to find when we get there that the machine is apparently broken. Thankfully, people will never run out of reasons to build apps, and there's now one called mcbroken that'll tell you whether the machine at your local McDonald's is working.

Rashiq Zahid built the web app by reverse-engineering the fast-food chain's internal application programming interface, or API, he said in a Thursday tweet. 

"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," he wrote, later clarifying: "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."

The app also shows what percentage of machines are currently broken in different cities, like New York, San Francisco and Chicago. (Seattle appears to really have it together, with the app showing all machines are currently working. But it looks like New York needs to step it up.) 

As Sahil Lavingia, CEO of e-commerce site Gumroad, commented, "this is why you learn to code." 

Indeed.