What was supposed to be the magical start to Labor Day weekend at Disney World in Florida turned into a vacation nightmare when a massive power surge reportedly shut down more than 40 attractions across all four theme parks simultaneously.
WKMG (News 6 Orlando) reported that the chaos began on Friday, August 29, just as families were settling in for one of the busiest vacation weekends of the year. Disney has not confirmed the exact cause, but several outlets noted that a severe thunderstorm was moving through the area at the time. It’s still unclear whether the storm actually triggered the outage or if the two events simply coincided.
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According to Disney fans and ride-tracking apps, the outage rippled across every park at once. At Magic Kingdom, many headliners—including Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train—were listed as “temporarily closed.” Over at EPCOT, rides such as Test Track, Mission: SPACE, and Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure went down, with fans noting that at one point only smaller attractions like Gran Fiesta Tour were operating.
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Hollywood Studios saw a moment when all attractions were offline simultaneously, before Tower of Terror later reopened as the lone operating ride. Even Animal Kingdom, which often weathers outages with fewer hiccups, had a window where Kilimanjaro Safaris was the only ride showing as open.
power outage across all 4 parks omfg?
a storm rolled through but it was nothing out of the ordinary for the area. we’re gonna go home and come back on sunday & monday.some people are stuck On the rides which is crazy. i hope non passholders get a refund because i’d be pissed if… pic.twitter.com/CSnzPFp131
— snips (@sniparoni) August 29, 2025
Transportation wasn’t spared either. Fans at the Transportation and Ticket Center reported that both Monorail lines were closed at the time, compounding the evening’s mayhem and leaving families to juggle disrupted schedules without clear restoration timelines.
Fortunately, recovery was swift. By Friday evening, a Guest Relations Cast Member told outlets like AllEars that operations had returned to normal, and News 6 Orlando reported most attractions were back open within hours.
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Outages of this scale—knocking out rides across all four parks at once—are rare. As Theme Park Insider editor Robert Niles told Fox News in 2020, “Disney World is built with multiple system redundancies to handle the strain of tens of millions of visitors a year in the lightning capital of the world [Central Florida].” He also noted at the time that the resort generates an enormous amount of power through its own solar facilities and maintains on-site backup sources.
Even with those safeguards, major disruptions still happen. Earlier this year, a February outage took down most of Magic Kingdom for hours, though it remained confined to that single park.
