Let's get this out of the way: the website name is pure hyperbole. Unfortunately no one (except for me) wants to read a boring website called "Theme Park Ride Uptime Percentages". Most people don't appreciate that there's almost nothing harder than keeping theme park attraction running through a million visitors a year. Engineering something that needs to work flawlessly millions of times annually is orders of magnitude more difficult than everyday engineering challenges. This site is absolutely not an indictment of the people who design and maintain these parks: they're performing minor miracles daily.
The genesis of this website concept comes from the numerous online posts about how theme parks "aren't what they used to be" every time a ride breaks down during someone's vacation. But when I went looking for hard data on park reliability, I couldn't find any. There are plenty of sites that'll tell you wait times, but none of them track park reliability. In my opinion, if we're going to talk about theme park reliability, let's do it with actual data, not anecdotes.
The other perennial debate is which parks have the longest wait times. "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." Once again, no actual numbers existed to compare parks to each other, so that became the second major feature of this site.
To be clear, all of the stats on this site are for actual rides, not shows, performances, restaurants, etc.
The problem with this little project is fairly judging one park against another is way more difficult than you'd think. If you just add up the ride downtime, that penalizes parks with more rides. If you just go with uptime percentage, you're penalizing parks that have a bunch of complicated rides instead of simple old-fashioned carnival-style rides.
The Shame Score is a LIVE, instantaneous metric that measures what proportion of a park's ride capacity is currently down, weighted by ride importance.
Where:
This is a real-time "right now" score, not cumulative over time. When a ride comes back up, the shame score immediately drops.
Every ride is classified into one of three tiers based on guest demand and impact:
| Tier | Weight | Description | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3× | Flagship attractions guests plan trips around | Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, Hagrid's, Velocicoaster |
| 2 | 2× | Major rides with consistent demand | Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted Mansion |
| 3 | 1× | Standard attractions, lower guest impact | Carousels, smaller flat rides |
Not all parks report ride status the same way:
Caveat: Parks that don't publish ride schedules may be penalized if they only run certain rides part of the day (e.g., only during peak hours), since we can't distinguish "scheduled closure" from "breakdown."
Problem: Some rides may be closed for extended refurbishment, seasonal operation, or other long-term reasons. If we included these in the denominator, parks could pad their score with rides that haven't run in weeks.
Solution: The "Total Park Weight" only includes rides that have operated at least once in the past 7 days. This means:
Problem: Raw downtime hours unfairly penalize larger parks. A park with 50 rides will naturally have more total downtime than a park with 20 rides. And 1 hour of downtime on Space Mountain hurts more guests than 1 hour on a carousel.
Solution: The Shame Score solves both problems:
Park A (small park): 1 Tier 1 ride currently down (weight = 5). Total park weight = 15. Shame Score = (5 ÷ 15) × 10 = 3.3
Park B (large park): 3 Tier 3 rides currently down (weight = 3 total). Total park weight = 45. Shame Score = (3 ÷ 45) × 10 = 0.7
Park A has a higher shame score because losing a single flagship ride has more guest impact than losing three minor rides. The score updates instantly as rides go down or come back up.
| Score Range | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| 0.0 – 1.0 | Excellent reliability |
| 1.0 – 3.0 | Good performance |
| 3.0 – 5.0 | Average |
| 5.0 – 10.0 | Below average |
| > 10.0 | Poor reliability |
Higher score = More shame = Worse performance (0-10+ scale)
Every ride is classified into one of three tiers based on guest demand and impact. See the tier table above for details. Tier classifications are maintained by the project team and updated when new rides open or guest demand patterns shift significantly.
Reliability % measures the percentage of time a ride stays running when it's supposed to be running. Specifically:
This only counts unplanned breakdowns (status = DOWN), not scheduled closures. If a ride is closed for a lunch break or weather, that doesn't count against it. We're measuring mechanical reliability: when the ride is supposed to be operating, does it actually work?
Availability % counts all time the ride isn't operating, including scheduled closures. For parks like Disney and Universal that distinguish DOWN (breakdown) from CLOSED (scheduled), reliability is the more meaningful metric because it isolates actual failures from planned downtime.
For parks that only report CLOSED without distinguishing breakdowns, we fall back to availability % for grading since that's the best data available.
| Grade | Reliability % | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| A | 98% and above | Excellent — top-tier reliability |
| B | 96% to 97.99% | Good — solid performance |
| C | 90% to 95.99% | Fair — noticeable issues |
| D | 85% to 89.99% | Poor — frequent breakdowns |
| F | Below 85% | Failing — seriously unreliable |
Theme parks have enormous economic incentive to keep rides running. Every minute a flagship attraction is down costs the park revenue and guest satisfaction. As a result, the vast majority of rides maintain very high reliability — most operate above 98% uptime.
That means the grades need to reflect reality: an "A" should represent the norm for a well-maintained ride, not some unattainable ideal. When a ride drops below 96%, something is genuinely wrong. Below 90%, guests are almost certainly noticing. And below 85% means the ride is broken more than an hour and a half out of every operating day.
These thresholds are calibrated against the actual distribution of all historical monthly reliability stats from our 5-minute snapshot data across Disney and Universal parks.
All live wait time and ride status data is powered by ThemeParks.wiki, an open-source API that aggregates real-time data from 50+ theme parks worldwide.
ThemeParks.wiki provides live data including:
The project is open-source under the Apache-2.0 license. You can view the source code on GitHub.
We collect snapshots every 5 minutes when parks are open, then aggregate this data to calculate downtime statistics and wait time trends over time.
Found something wrong? We want to hear about it. Seriously. Whether it's a ride listed under the wrong park, a tier classification you disagree with, broken charts, or data that looks suspicious. We'd rather know than let it fester.
This site runs on obsessive attention to detail, and we can't catch everything ourselves. If something's off, drop us a line at feedback@themeparkhallofshame.com and we'll get it sorted.