But why "broken" instead of "down for scheduled maintenance"?
The latter implies continuance of service, the former leaves that open.
The latter implies continuance of service, the former leaves that open.
When I worked that McDonalds the machine was almost always down simply because the night crew didn't give a shit and it was too much effort to clean. I worked mornings with the old folks because I was too uncool for the night shift.
Even though it's a valid distinction, I'm not sure it's one that's valuable to the interaction being described.
As these kinds of places attract the pettiest and most annoying customers anything else would make the customers try to bargain with you, even for stupid crap like that.
The flip side is that when you have a non-standard request to a business (like a bank) or a government agency, it used to be that a low-level clerk would have some workarounds, or you could escalate to a manager. Now, they all have a convenient excuse: "the system doesn't let me do that". And it's true, because it's all SaaS software with inflexible business rules, controlled by some central team that neither you nor the clerk will ever be able to reach.
People have said "the phone lines are down" for years, meaning landline phone service was temporarily unavailable (often when no actual physical cables were knocked down off of poles, etc, though that might be where the use of the term originated in that case).
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of using 'down' to mean the same kind of thing (all of which predated computer use being common in a regular person's life).
Like hang up, when was the last time I hung up a phone, that style of phone went out of fashion here 30 or more years ago.
Server looked confused - but which burger did I want? It became apparent that while I could ask for a preset item and ask for removals, I could not actually go fully off menu. So I had to ask for "the cheese burger, without the cheese" (as somehow distinct to say, the bacon burger, without the bacon). I laughed at the ludicrousness of that, but now I see they were channeling Sartre! In retrospect it would have been a truly beautiful absurdity if see had come back and said "sorry, we have no cheese, do you want no bacon?"
Some people would look down on a franchise or a restaurant or a business that had super high failure rates. Like if the comedy section of Netflix went down every 3 times you tried to visit that section. As opposed to Netflix having some system level limitation requiring them to perform some magical dance and perform some spell every few days to keep the server room from exploding.
You would perhaps give Netflix more leeway and not feel as much disdain and switch to a competitor if you knew that the comedy section being down every once in a while was some legitimate limit the engineers had found and not just a shoddy organization. But if you just got some nginx 500 error page randomly you would be like 'wow this site is hot garbage'.
I'd be willing to bet that "broken" is just less likely to start a fight with an enraged customer whose day was very slightly inconvenienced by their inability to consume extra junk food.