We went to all four parks for two days in December, and I think we had five attractions down or clearly in disarray.
First was Kilimanjaro Safari. We had a LL for it and were walking towards it when we got the notification that we now had an anytime LL. This was odd since the weather was fine, so that wasn’t the issue. I know the attraction gets backed up when an animal stops on the tracks, but it was down for about an hour so not sure what the issue was. Someone commented that a vehicle’s axle twisted a few weeks ago, so maybe it was something similar?
Then we went to Epcot and had a IA$ for Remy. Once again as we were walking over it went down, but luckily went back up like 15 minutes later. We got on and could tell park of the ride was off. We stopped a few times, the longest being a minute near the end where we could tell the vehicles in the room ahead of us were delayed. We could hear the scene being played out on the screen as we stared at a wall waiting to go in next. Not a huge issue, and it was only two months old at that point and with such an advanced ride I bet there are still bugs in the system.
The next day we had some biggish issues with Toy Story Mania. You know how sometimes if you vehicle is a little delayed they will give you a practice round? We got a practice round on nearly every screen. It’s like there was some huge delay that caused a chain reaction. Then we got to maybe the third or fourth screen and it was just orange. Literally just orange. The computer must have crashed. When we got off we let the CMs know, more just as a heads up to them, and they offered to let us go again. Sweet! So we went again and sure enough every screen had that practice round. While on the ride I commented that it was probably just a few minutes from being totally down. And sure enough I checked My Disney Experience and it was down for a bit that afternoon.
And if I remember correctly, I think while we were at Hollywood Studios we noticed on our app another big attraction (maybe Millenium Falcon?) went down briefly. I think I commented out loud how busy it felt, and sure enough it was because a major attraction was offline so a lot of people around the park were scrambling about what to do next.
Then in Magic Kingdom I guess we got cursed by the power of Zurg because we had another Toy Story ride issue! Buzz was operating, but barely. First, and most importantly, my brother’s laser (who I was riding with) just didn’t work. Like totally not operational. Then the sound in the whole ride was just really quiet. Like some of the speakers were out. Then we got to the tunnel screen part and it was totally out to. Just a gray tunnel of nothingness. We also mentioned it to the CM who asked again if we wanted to go again, but at that point we just didn’t feel like it. To be fair, all of this happened at maybe 8:45ish PM, after Enchantment, so clearly had been running all day. Maybe the CMs were just trying to squeeze as much as they could out of it before closing it for the night? Idk, it made the whole attraction feel cheap, like a half broken county fair ride.
Also when we were about to get on the Peoplemover we noticed that maybe every third car had a traffic cone in it, indicating to not seat people in it. The attraction was still moving, but clearly they couldn’t fill it to the highest capacity because of it.
But to counter some of this, I see some people commenting about being “stuck” on Spaceship Earth and Haunted Mansion, but from my understanding most of the time stopping on either doesn’t mean the attraction is broken. Since they are omnimovers in constant motion, it’s hard for people in wheelchairs or with mobility challenges to step on the attraction and get settled by the time they leave the loading platform, so most of the time those “stuck” moments is the CMs voluntarily stopping or slowing the ride so people can get on and off safely. And since everything is connected, once it’s stopped at the platform it’s stopped throughout the attraction. So while we went on both attractions and were stuck on them for a few moments, I’m assuming it was perfectly normal and there were no operational issues. In fact, I saw this happen myself when we got on Haunted Mansion - they had to stop just as we were about to step on to get someone ahead of us on, and right as we were about to get to the exit platform we stopped again so they could get off.