Amazon Outage Derails Disney Theme Parks’ Major Systems

Disney World guests said Tuesday visits to the theme park were “a nightmare” as services were disrupted by an Amazon Web Services outage.

When a major global Amazon Web Services outage disrupted the cloud computing services it provides to many companies, media outlets, streaming services, universities and even governments Tuesday, it also disrupted the magic at Walt Disney World parks in Orlando.

The AWS outage derailed major systems at the theme park, interrupting services like Disney Genie, transportation, mobile ordering, entrance admissions, and park pass, hotel and dining reservations, according to the Inside the Magic blog.

The outage Tuesday left customers struggling to use Instacart, Venmo, Kindle, Roku, Disney+, among other companies, the Associated Press reported. Patch.com was also affected by the outage.

As of Tuesday evening, those using the My Disney Experience app for Walt Disney World received the following message when they opened the app: “Pardon the inconvenience. Some of our digital experiences may be unavailable at this time. We’re actively working to resolve this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

The technical issues caused headaches for many visitors on Tuesday.

“The app was not working for wait times. Super bummer,” Facebook user Kim Beers, who spent the day at Animal Kingdom, told Patch. “And the lines at the registers were extra-long, as they were having problems with the register for gift cards, (annual passholder) discounts, etc.”

Another Facebook user called the experience “a nightmare,” especially when it comes to transportation around Disney World.

“Been here since 9 a.m.,” she told Patch. “Fog stopped ferries, then (the) AWS outage made lunch a (three-and-a-half hour) affair, then no monorails, not enough busses or boats to move all the people. Calling it a day, will try again tomorrow.”

Some rides even stopped working because of the issues, Trudy Ratajczak said, noting that “earlier at Epcot the rides went down.”

Her daughter had trouble accessing her boarding pass for Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, a new 4D ride at Epcot, as the app pushed back her boarding group time.

With all the problems Tuesday, another Facebook user, Kristen McKevitt, said she was ready to cancel her Wednesday visit to Disney, but had difficulties doing so.

“(The) app isn’t working to cancel a reservation for tomorrow,” she said. “Says you can only call the phone number and then get the ‘all circuits are busy’ message.”

In a Facebook comment, Cub Larkin, summed up the day at the theme park as “pretty bad.”

He added, “Basically, anything tied to the Disney backend system wasn’t working.”