Getting a Cease and Desist from Waffle House

Summary

In late September of 2024, Hurricane Helene was spiraling towards Florida, my home state. My university had cancelled classes for the week, and while people were barricading their homes, I was spending time reverse-engineering Waffle House’s website. Why, you may ask? If you’ve never heard of the Waffle House Index, you’re in for a bit of weirdly fascinating disaster response lore. The Waffle House Index is an (incredibly) unofficial tool used by FEMA to gauge the severity of natural disasters. Why Waffle House? Because they’re infamous for not closing even during the worst of storms. If the House is closed, that means things are getting real. The problem with the Waffle House Index is that there’s not really an actual “index” you can check. No live feed, no map, and certainly no counter of closed restaurants — just a few wisps of a mention on Wikipedia pages and articles throughout the web (including one blog post on their actual website!). ...so, naturally, I built one. I already dove into the technical side of things in a YouTube video I published, which I’ll link below, but here’s the technical gist of how the site worked. The Technicals Waffle House uses Next.js for their site (or at least, their location information site). Incredibly based choice, by the way. This meant that they also utilized React Server Components, which made it hard to scrape or find any single source of truth for data about the websites. React Server Components run on the server, and unlike client-side components, they don’t return raw HTML you can easily inspect in Dev Tools. That means you’ll need to get a bit creative to see how data is being fetched. After spending more time than I’d like to admit digging through their source code, I ended up finding a Next.js file that had a JSON body of the data injected into the client after being executed on the server. This file had information about every single open location, their status (if they were busy or not), and more importantly, if the...