Software Engineer Reverse-Engineers McDonald’s Ordering API To Find Locations With a Broken Ice Cream Machine

Software engineer Rashiq Zahid debuted a web app today that uses a reverse-engineered version of McDonald’s ordering API to query every single McDonald’s in the United States. “Assuming a store has correctly indicated that ice cream is unavailable and that its ice cream machine isn’t working, it’ll show up as a little red dot on the McBroken map,” reports Lifehacker. From the report: Zahid even built in a statistics box into McBroken so you can see how various cities compare for ice cream uptime. According to Zahid, his system works by queueing up nearly $20,000 worth of orders each minute. Don’t worry; he’s not placing them and cancelling them over and over, so no McDonald’s worker has yet to dunk their head in the fryer as a result of Zahid’s shenanigans. A number of different users on Twitter and Product Hunt have tested out Zahid’s app by heading over to their local McDonald’s restaurants and seeing what they can order. For the most part, the app checks out. Of course, there will still be occasional instances where a “working” ice cream machine actually isn’t. Or, if you’re lucky, you might find that an offline ice cream machine has since been reincarnated and that McDonald’s simply forgot to note the change on their end. As for how long this little tool will exist before McDonald’s gets wind of it and breaks its functionality, well, I’d place my ice cream order sooner than later.