McBroken Review: The Genius Website That Tells You If McDonald’s Ice Cream Machine Is Broken

A full review of mcbroken.com — the real-time tracker born from frustration, reverse-engineering, and a very specific craving for a McFlurry

The Origin Story

Few websites on the internet have a more relatable origin story than McBroken. In the summer of 2020, Rashiq Zahid — a then-24-year-old software engineer living in Berlin — tried to add a McSundae to his order through the McDonald’s mobile app, only to find it marked “currently unavailable.” For most people, this would have been a minor annoyance. For Zahid, it was the spark of an idea.

He realized that the McDonald’s app must be checking machine availability in real time. If a location’s ice cream items were listed as unavailable in the app, the machine was almost certainly down. With this insight and considerable coding skill, Zahid reverse-engineered McDonald’s internal API and built a bot that would simulate an $18,752 ice cream order — every single minute — across every McDonald’s location in the country, just to see which ones would accept it.

He tested his system in Berlin first, personally cycling to each McDonald’s to verify the results. When accuracy was confirmed, he launched McBroken for the United States. The site hit 10,000 visitors in under 30 minutes after going live on Twitter.

How It Works

McBroken is elegantly simple in concept. Every 30 minutes, it attempts to add ice cream items to a cart at every McDonald’s location in its database through the McDonald’s ordering interface. If the items can be added, the machine is working and the location gets a green dot on the map. If the items are marked unavailable, the location turns red. Gray dots indicate unknown status.

The result is a real-time heat map of McDonald’s ice cream machine availability across the United States. At any given time, you can zoom into your neighborhood, spot the nearest green-dotted location, and head out knowing your McFlurry dreams will actually come true. The site also surfaces nationwide statistics — typically somewhere between 7% and 15% of all McDonald’s ice cream machines are broken at any given time, with cities like New York sometimes topping 40%.

Accuracy & Reliability

Independent spot-checks have confirmed McBroken’s accuracy to be impressively high. When users compare McBroken’s green and red dots against the actual availability shown in the official McDonald’s app, they match consistently. The 30-minute refresh cycle means data is nearly always current, though there is a small window where a machine might break or come back online between updates.

Even McDonald’s corporate seemed impressed. The company’s VP of U.S. Communications praised Zahid’s dedication publicly, calling him “a true McDonald’s fan” for going to such lengths for customers. McDonald’s USA also issued an official statement acknowledging the site and reaffirming its commitment to dessert availability — an outcome Zahid certainly never expected.

Pros & Cons

Verdict