How to check if your local McDonald’s ice cream machine is broken

If you’re a fan of McDonald’s, you’ve probably been to a drive-thru craving a McFlurry or a milkshake, only to find out that the ice cream machine is broken.

This problem has become one of the internet’s longest-standing memes, and something that the public have trolled the fast food chain about for a long time.

Here’s how you can check ahead of time, to save the disappointment.

Is the ice cream machine broken at my local McDonald’s?

Luckily, there is a way to find out how a McDonald’s ice cream machine is doing before you leave the house.

Thanks to the internet attention that this notorious first-world problem has garnered, someone invented a website to check if the ice cream machine is down at your local McDonald’s, and it’s called mcbroken.com.

As you can see, 14% of all McDonald’s ice cream machines in the country are currently down, and this looks to be a pretty consistent figure on any date. That may not seem like a large percentage, but that’s nearly 2,000 ice cream machines down.

This website also shows the statistics in the UK and Germany. A 24-year-old software engineer invented this site after he couldn’t get a sundae at a McDonald’s in Berlin. “I just made it for fun,” he said. “But people were like, ‘Wow, this is the best thing I’ve seen this entire week.”

If you’re wondering how it works, it’s pretty smart. He invented a bot that reverse-engineered the McDonald’s app to try and add an ice cream product to the basket in every store in the US, UK, and Germany every 30 minutes.

If the ice cream machine is broken, the product won’t be able to be added to the cart, and therefore the website will update. So, this app is as accurate as these sorts of things can be, as long as the McDonald’s store remembers to update its menu on their end.

That being said, you can always ring ahead to double-check if you want to be sure you’ll get that McFlurry.

Why is McDonald’s ice cream machine often broken?

There are lots of theories as to why the McDonald’s ice cream machines often break, but bear in mind that they are not always broken – it can just seem like that when the internet has fixated on this for so long.

The machines typically break from being overheated which involves calling out a technician to fix the issue, however, the fix is not always simple.

McDonald’s are only allowed to call out technicians who work for the company that makes their ice-cream machines, and they are not always readily available.

However, there is an act in the pipeline from the DOJ that hopes to put an end to this issue.

With the delicious dessert options that McDonald’s is frequently dropping, it can be frustrating to find out that you won’t be able to order the latest McFlurry – but the good news is that McDonald’s rarely runs out of fries.