About

McDonald's Ice Cream Machine refers to jokes about how the ice cream machines in McDonald's restaurants are frequently broken and unable to serve customers any ice cream products. Over the latter half of the 2010s, broken McDonald's ice cream machines were regularly referenced in multiple meme templates, leading to several YouTube videos where people investigated why they seemed to be broken so frequently.

Origin

McDonald's introduced ice cream to its menu in 1997 with the advent of the McFlurry. Jokes about how the machine was often out of order started in late 2016 with the Whoppy Machine Broke and Understandable, Have a Nice Day memes (example shown below).

Spread

Over the following years, jokes about McDonald's Ice Cream Machine were fit into several meme templates (examples shown below).

The popularity of the meme led to several videos investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines were so commonly out of order. On June 8th, 2020, YouTuber Vlog Creations uploaded a video where he enters various McDonald's restaurants under the guise of being a technician for the ice cream machine. On April 23rd, 2021, YouTuber Johnny Harris uploaded a 30 minute-video exploring the phenomenon and its history. He came to the conclusion that the machines' manufacturer designs them to intentionally break during cleaning, in order to increase the number of paid visits from service technicians.

McBroken.com

On October 22nd, 2020, Twitter user @rashiqfn opened a website called McBroken.com that displays a map of all McDonald's restaurants in the U.S. and whether or not its ice cream machine is currently operational. It attracted attention from news websites The Verge^[1] and Delish.^[2]

Welcome To McDonald’s Whatchu Order Bruh? Can I Get An Oreo McFlurry Yuh

Welcome To McDonald’s Whatchu Order Bruh? Can I Get An Oreo McFlurry Yuh was posted on March 24th, 2021, TikTok user @damedamian posted a video imagining a conversation between a McDonald's worker and a customer about the broken ice cream machine. The video was set to music and gained over 7 million views (shown below).

The video turned into a popular sound on TikTok, with over 34,000 videos made using the sound.^[3] Some popular examples of the sound include a video by @official_azz that gained over 1.6 million likes (shown below, left) and a video by @itsjibb that gained over 1.4 million likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search interest

External References