McDonald’s Has a Major Change Coming, and It’s the Best News We’ve Heard All Week

We’ve all been there: You’re picking up a quick and delicious meal at McDonald’s and thinking to yourself, you know what would make this even better? An ice cream treat at the end. So you ask for a McFlurry, only to be told that the ice cream machine is broken. 

The broken ice cream machine is such a notorious problem for McDonald’s that it spawned a website, McBroken, to see whether the machine is working at your closest location. Jason Koebler of 404 Media told NPR, “There was a person who actually tracked the uptime of McFlurry machines in the United States and found that at any given moment, 10% of all of the machines were broken.” 

But thanks to a brand-new national copyright law exemption, the memes and TikTok videos poking fun at the fast food giant’s inability to keep its soft serve flowing might soon be a thing of the past.

Why Do McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines Break So Often?

In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed to prevent third parties from bypassing digital locks on copyrighted material, including for repairs. In other words, the act made it illegal for McDonald’s employees to repair its ice cream machines, because they are manufactured by the Taylor Company, which holds the copyrights for its equipment. Thus, only authorized repair people from the Taylor Company had the right to fix it. So the problem isn’t so much why the machines break down, but rather, what made it so challenging to fix them.

As of Oct. 28, 2024, new exemptions to the act’s Section 1201, allow people to legally hack or circumvent software locks on food service equipment—like the McFlurry machine—to repair them. While this might mean we will finally be able to get our hands on our favorite McFlurry flavors soon (we’re looking at you, Grandma McFlurry), the solution isn’t as simple as adding a few exemptions to this complicated technology protection measure.

According to Koebler, who has long been covering this issue, a company known as Kytch has been in legal limbo with Taylor for years after they made a device to make it easier for McDonald’s locations to cheat the locks. Unfortunately, the ruling doesn’t allow companies to sell or distribute certain tools that are needed to repair specific machines.

It’s hard to predict how things will go from here, but we are holding out hope that a smart, industrious few at McDonald’s will find a way to fix the ice cream equipment until it is legal to sell the appropriate tools.