It seems the first explanation given wasn’t entirely accurate (or is at least misleading), as they continued roughly 50 minutes later:
> to clarify how this works: mcdonald's keeps track which locations have a broken machine, I'm merely querying for those - no order gets executed, no ice cream is actually wasted
Maybe in reality, the order is created, but not actually “placed” in order to query the above info? Or maybe the first tweet was simply clickbait...