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Anyone who indulges in McDonald's McFlurries has been met with the disappointing response from an employee, "Our ice cream machine is down."
It happens so often that someone built a bot that keeps track of which machines are broken across McDonald's locations in the United States; all 14,000 of them.
According to Vice, machines have been breaking down less frequently and there's a reason for that.
An independent company called Kytch has created a device that helps McDonald's franchise owners repair the ice cream machines.
Before Kytch, the company behind the McFlurry machine, Taylor, had a monopoly on repairs of the ice cream machines.
The company attempted to maintain its monopoly by telling McDonald's franchisees that using Kytch's devices would cause "serious human injury."
But on July 30, Kytch won a legal fight against Taylor.
A California judge granted a temporary restraining order against Taylor after Kytch claimed Taylor acquired a Kytch Solution Devices in order to learn its secrets, reports Vice.
In a court document, Taylor's COO admits they attempted to obtain a Kytch device "in order to evaluate and assess its potential technology-related impacts upon our Soft Serve Machine—such as whether the radio frequency of the Kytch device would interfere with our software signal, or whether the Kytch device would drain the power source of our software and/or cause it malfunction," but denied that Taylor mined it for trade secrets or even "need such information."