Taco Bell Employee’s Empty Restaurant Video Goes Viral Amid Multistate Cyclospora Outbreak

A video shared to X by the account @WallStreetApes shows a Taco Bell employee walking through an empty restaurant, with no dine-in or drive-thru orders showing on the store's screen and only a handful of delivery orders active on DoorDash.

Captioning the video, the X user wrote that the employee was "reporting they now have no customers" because of the cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to lettuce served at some Taco Bell locations, and noted that stores would typically show "10-30+ delivery app orders at any given time."

The X user also reported that the CDC has listed on their government webpage information connecting Taco Bell to the outbreak, being a major factor in the massive decrease in their business.

The CDC reported that as of July 13, more than 1,600 people across five states — Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia — had been infected with the Cyclospora parasite in connection with the outbreak, with 94 hospitalizations reported.

The agency's official outbreak page states that epidemiologic and traceback data point to shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico as the source making people sick, and advises against eating shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell locations in the affected states.

Taylor Farms de Mexico voluntarily recalled all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico on July 17, according to the FDA's investigation page, and Taco Bell confirmed it had stopped using lettuce from that supplier the same day.

Reacting to the video, one commenter pointed to the farm as well, writing, "The US produces enough lettuce to meet demands. A specific cluster (including many Taco Bell customers) has been traced to shredded iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico (central Mexico supplier)."

Another user joked about the situation, "Business model to rapidly increase sales? On paper it looks like this: Explosive diarrhea empties the body quicker, customers get hungry sooner from being empty, customer buys more burritos, the cycle repeats, we sell more stuff faster."

However, a report by NPR showed that the FDA later retracted an earlier lab result that had identified Cyclospora in a lettuce sample from the supplier, with Taylor Farms stating the agency has not identified a single confirmed positive product test.

One reply argued the outbreak might paradoxically help the chain's reputation going forward, writing, "What people don't understand is, now Taco Bell is the safest place to eat. They're under the microscope. My old economics professor talked about this. He said, 'If you think no other business is not [sic] in the same boat with their products, you're crazy.'"

The Daily Dot was unable to independently verify the employee's identity, the specific restaurant location shown in the video, or whether the slow business shown in the clip was directly caused by the outbreak rather than other factors. The details above reflect the video as shared on X, supplemented by reporting from the CDC, FDA, and NPR.