Claim:
A video authentically showed an entire McDonalds restaurant in Branson, Missouri, falling into a sinkhole with customers still inside.
Rating:
A video that circulated online in late October 2025 showed an entire McDonalds restaurant falling into a sinkhole with customers still inside in Branson, Mo. Snopes readers reached out to inquire if the video was authentic.
An account named Branson Area Breaking News posted the video on social media platforms including YouTube (archived) and TikTok (archived). The most popular instance of the post appeared on the account’s Facebook page, garnering more than 1 million views. Its caption read, “A sinkhole opened under a Branson McDonald’s this afternoon, swallowing the entire building in seconds.”
The Branson Area Breaking News Facebook account said it was “satire/parody” in its bio. The video also appeared to be generated with artificial intelligence. As such, we have rated this video as labeled satire.
Debunking the video
Searching Google for “Branson McDonald’s sinkhole” found no news outlets reporting about the incident. The story would have been widely reported if true.
Some social media pages use Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, to produce fantastical videos that attract clicks. The latest version of the video generator, Sora 2, includes a moving Sora watermark to help differentiate AI-produced videos from real ones. The watermark features an animated Sora logo that cycles through the top left, middle right and bottom left of videos. Here (archived) is an example of a Sora 2 video that Snopes verified as AI-generated:
Government shutdown, no Food Stamps in November, people about to be like 😭🤣😂
The McDonald’s sinkhole video features faint blurs in those three exact positions. Digital editing tools were likely used to remove the Sora logo from the video in an attempt to make it more believable (blurs shown below, circled in yellow).
(Facebook page Branson Area Breaking News/Snopes Illustration)
An owner of the page who identified herself as “Margaret” told us via Facebook Messenger that she took the video with her “iPhone 4 smartphone.” Margaret previously has told a Missouri news outlet that some users don’t realize the accounts post content that isn’t real, and the Branson Area Breaking News page has previously posted images (archived) that Sightengine, a tool for detecting AI-generated images, gave a 99% chance of being AI-generated. (It’s worth noting that AI detectors are not completely reliable.)
For further reading, Snopes investigated a video from the same Facebook page showing thousands of bald eagles at a veteran’s cemetery.
