When you go to Disney World for a vacation, it’s natural to want everything to go smoothly.

But unfortunately, sometimes things happen! Since so many aspects of your Disney World trip are now online or part of the My Disney Experience app, there are bound to be glitches and issues. We’re taking you through nine glitches that could impact your next Disney World vacation!

Rise of the Resistance Boarding Groups

Let’s get the space-themed elephant out of the room right away. Rise of the Resistance in Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It’s is one of the most technologically advanced rides in Disney World, and DEF worth saying you’ve experienced. But the technology for getting a boarding pass to ride the attraction? Not so much.

The My Disney Experience app is notorious for having issues, especially surrounding Rise of the Resistance passes. ICYMI, in order to experience Rise of the Resistance in Disney’s Hollywood Studios, guests must try to acquire a boarding group. Think of it as holding your place in line, but only so many spots are handed out each day — way less than there are people who want to ride! There are two times to try for a group: 7AM from any location and 1PM from ONLY inside the park.

The biggest issue we’ve seen with the boarding passes is that the app with either think you’re NOT in the park when you are (for 1PM) or — possibly MORE frustrating — think you’re not in the park at 7AM…hours before the park even opens. There is no real way to tell if this glitch will happen to you or not, but if it does, take screenshots! If you can prove that you were in the park and you were trying to get a boarding group (at 1PM), then a Cast Member might be able to help you out. No promises. Remember — if it glitches on you, it probably glitched on LOTS of people!

Head to Guest Relations in the park and ask nicely about the glitch that happened to you. In our experience, we’ve been able to get a boarding pass by going to a Cast Member and explaining the issue. This is NOT guaranteed, though, but you’ll have a better chance if you are kind to the Cast Member you speak with.

Usually this glitch doesn’t happen to everyone, but not too long ago, a widespread glitch like this occurred during the 7AM boarding group slot. This is something to be aware of if you are set on riding Rise of the Resistance. This is a very HOT ride to snag an elusive slot to ride, so when in doubt, take screenshots of EVERYTHING!

See more about the recent Rise of the Resistance glitch by clicking here!

Mobile Order Goes Down

Mobile Order is a must in Disney World these days. Many fast food locations are trying to simply not have guests queued up in line to order food, so preordering and paying for your meal from your phone sounds like a slam dunk. But what happens if the system goes down? Well, it has happened, and it was actually handled very well in our experience.

During our visit to EPCOT, we received a notification on the My Disney Experience app that Mobile Order was temporarily unavailable. When this happened, we decided to investigate and see how the Cast Members were handling it.

Because of how Disney handled the situation, this is one of the fails on the list that likely won’t affect your vacation too much. When Mobile Order went down, Cast Members sprung into action and helped create a physically distanced line for guests to order at a walk-up register.

Mobile Order is heavily encouraged in these times to reduce crowding and limit contact between people, so it’s a pretty big deal when it goes down. This glitch rarely happens, but this is what it was like when it did! You’ll still get to order your food, but you might have to wait in a line to do so.

Here’s more on how Disney handled Mobile Order being down

The Disney World App Crashes

Apps on your phone crash sometimes, and the My Disney Experience app is no exception. In our experience, we’ve seen the app open, but we got a message that “some of our digital experiences may be unavailable at this time.”

Although Fastpass+ is not available in the parks right now, the app crashing can affect your experience with Fastpasses. If you can’t access the app, you won’t be able to see your Fastpass reservation times, and if you needed to show them to a Cast Member, you wouldn’t be able to. Just in case, you can screenshot (can you tell we love that tip??) your Fastpasses so that way if the app does crash, you have all the information you would need.

The app is also useful for pulling up Park Pass Reservations and dining reservations. You can screenshot these as well before your trip so you have the info no matter what. If it is just the app that is down, you should be able to access all of your information on a web browser on your phone!

See what the latest Disney World app glitch was like

False Dining Reservations

In late 2020, dining reservations had a MAJOR glitch. A lot of guests noticed that hard-to-get dining reservations randomly had wide-open availability. Naturally, guests grabbed the reservations that they had been wanting.

A little bit later, reservations suddenly became unavailable for any location! Even on the My Disney Experience app, we got a pop-up that said “reservations are currently unavailable.”

Within a couple of days the reservation system was back up and running smoothly, but a Disney representative reached out about the reservations made during the glitch. The representative said that the sudden availability and subsequent crash were due to technical difficulties from the system as a whole.

Unfortunately, any of the dining reservations that were overbooked during the glitch were canceled to continue complying with social distancing in restaurants. Guests affected were given a $25 Disney gift card, but those beloved dining reservations were automatically lost.

The system does not crash often, but if you see tons of hard-to-get dining reservations pop-up out of nowhere, just know that it could be a glitch! Still, doesn’t hurt to snag what you’re after and see what happens. Disney is typically very good about communicating in these instances.

Learn more about the dining reservation glitch

Theme Park Entry

Plenty of technical difficulties happen inside the Disney World theme parks, but they can happen while trying to ENTER a park too! In October of 2020, we walked up to the entrance of Disney’s Animal Kingdom to find a HUGE line of people. We didn’t think it could be this crowded on a weekday, and then we found out the issue.

All of the entry scanners at the park were having technical difficulties! Cast Members were quick to solve the issue and manually scanned each guest into the park. It was pretty backed up and took a bit longer to get into Animal Kingdom, but overall it wasn’t too big of a deal.

We haven’t seen this happen since then, but you never know when it could happen!

Entry Glitch Causes Long Lines and Large Crowds in Disney World

Ghost Disney Accounts

When using My Disney Experience, each member of your party will have their own profile. Sometimes the person making the reservations and planning the majority of the trip makes each person an account simply by adding their name to a dining reservation. Problem is, if the person in question already has an account, you’ll have to deal with the dreaded Disney ghost account. 👻

For those who have duplicate profiles, your reservations may be split. For example, one of the profiles may have the dining and hotel reservations while the other profile has the tickets and Park Pass Reservations. This can cause issues if you are trying to get into a park, into your hotel room, or (especially) Rise of the Resistance boarding groups.

The solution to this is pretty simple. You’ll need to call Disney and tell them you want to combine the two (or more) accounts. Unfortunately, this can mean a lengthy wait on hold, but a Cast Member will be happy to walk you through the process and make sure everything is conjoined.

Learn more about My Disney Experience

Big Ticket Releases

Have you ever been waiting for a BIG release (tickets, merchandise, etc.) and all of a sudden the page shuts down? Well, this happens A LOT with huge Disney events or releases.

Just last week, Disney released tickets to the A Touch of Disney event at Disney California Adventure and it was kind of a rollercoaster trying to grab tickets. After the wait time was jumping around, the site eventually “paused” and said they were “temporarily unable to sell more tickets.” It later resumed but sold out very quickly.

This happens with lots of Disney events online like the original release of Park Passes in 2020, runDisney spots, and Merchpass on shopDisney. When a big online drop is going to happen, be prepared to join the queue. Even worse — be prepared to get booted out the queue, have the site crash, and more. Just like with Rise of the Resistance boarding groups, you’ll want to be on top of the release time so that you have a better chance of scoring tickets or merchandise.

Another tip is to have several devices ready to go. You can have both your phone and computer ready to hop in the virtual queue to increase your chances of getting whatever you are trying to get! Keep in mind, in tight situations where a virtual queue is in play, hopping on multiple browsers or multiple devices can help. 

Read about the latest Disney virtual queue glitch here

Disney Transportation

Disney World transportation has its faults too! Since the Disney Skyliner opened in 2019, we’ve seen it break down again and again..and again. It is a super useful tool especially if you are staying at one of the Skyliner resorts, but there are a couple of reasons that it could fail you.

The Skyliner has been unavailable in the past due to high winds in the area. When winds are super crazy, it is not safe for those gondolas to be moving with guests in them. Each Skyliner resort has buses though, so you can take that as an alternative route if you find yourself running into this problem.

Also, the Skyliner is based in technology and, as such, it breaks down sometimes! Guests have been stuck in the Skyliner before while the technical difficulties were figured out, but this is pretty rare.

The Monorail has been around for quite some time, and it also breaks down from time to time! Similar to the Skyliner resorts, the resorts along the Monorail have buses that can take you to each park when you need an alternate route. Plus, with the new Grand Floridian walkway, you can most likely walk to the Magic Kingdom from many monorail resort hotels!

The buses tend to be pretty reliable, even if they are slow and not quite as fun as the Skyliner or Monorail.

See the Monorail being evacuated in Disney World

Attractions Going Down

Last but not least, attractions break down ALL. THE. TIME. in Disney World! Most are not as extreme as a Jungle Cruise boat sinking, or a full evacuation off of Splash Mountain, but you can probably expect at least one attraction to be down during your Disney World trip — possibly with you on it!

Most of the time the technical difficulties are quick fixes and the attraction comes back within a few hours. Other times, the ride will be down for days! This happened with Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster in Disney’s Hollywood Studios for the first 5 days of January!

Note that if you’re stuck for an extended time on a broken-down ride, Disney will usually try to make it right however they can. Nobody actually wants their favorite ride to break down when you only get limited time in a certain park, but sometimes it happens. Be prepared for plans to change, and cross your fingers that it will reopen later in the day!

Remember that time a Jungle Cruise boat sank?!?

When it comes to Disney World vacations, sometimes you’ve gotta roll with the punches. Things may go wrong and your vacation may be a little different than planned, but that’s okay! These are some of the fails that you may experience, and hopefully this gives you some solutions or workarounds if these issues come up during your Disney World trip.

15 Disney World Problems You Can Solve in 5 Minutes or Less

Have you ever experienced a glitch while in Disney World? Let us know in the comments!