Are Disney Rides Getting Less Reliable?

The internet is pretty sure Disney rides are falling apart. Every trip report has a story about Space Mountain going down, about Rise of the Resistance evacuations, about the carousel that somehow broke. We tracked every ride status change across all six Disney parks for four years to find out if it’s true.

It isn’t. Disney rides are getting more reliable.

A quick note on measurement. If you just count breakdowns, parks with more rides will always look worse. Disneyland tracks 40+ rides; Animal Kingdom tracks 7. Raw counts are meaningless. The Shame Score fixes this by normalizing for park size and weighting by ride importance: a flagship like Space Mountain going down counts three times more than a teacup ride, because that’s how guests experience it. Higher scores mean worse reliability. The number to remember: across all six Disney parks, the Shame Score dropped 16% from 2022 to 2025.

But the two coasts are getting there in very different ways.

Disneyland Resort averages about 440 breakdowns per ride per year. Walt Disney World averages about 180. That’s not a typo. DLR rides break down 2.4 times more often than their WDW counterparts. If you only looked at that number, you’d assume Anaheim was a disaster.

It isn’t, because DLR has gotten substantially faster at fixing things. Average breakdown duration dropped from 45 minutes to 39 minutes between 2022 and 2025, a step change that landed in 2024 and held. Major breakdowns (the ones lasting over an hour) fell from 27% of all events to 20%. The rides still go down constantly, but they come back faster, and the long outages that wreck your afternoon happen less.

WDW took the opposite path. Breakdown frequency dropped 15% over the same period (212 per ride per year down to 180), while resolution time stayed flat around 47 to 49 minutes. Fewer things break. When they do, they take roughly the same amount of time to fix as they always have.

Both approaches work. DLR’s Shame Score dropped 20% (0.376 to 0.299). WDW’s dropped 13% (0.248 to 0.216). DLR is improving faster but from a worse starting point, and it’s still 38% worse than WDW in absolute terms.

But do Tier 1 rides follow the same pattern? Not cleanly. The improvement is more visible in the overall fleet than in the headliners. Flagship rides are mechanically complex, and the year-to-year variation in their breakdown data is noisy enough that calling it a trend would be overstating it. The gains are real; they’re just concentrated in the rides you weren’t worried about in the first place.

Disney California Adventure is the standout: a 27% Shame Score improvement over four years, declining every single year. Whatever DCA’s maintenance team changed, it worked, and it kept working. Disneyland proper improved 14%, a steady decline that tracked its sister park at a more modest pace. Between the two of them, Disneyland Resort went from being the least reliable Disney resort to merely the more eventful one.

At Walt Disney World, Magic Kingdom improved a solid 9%, the slow and steady workhorse. Epcot was already among the most reliable Disney parks and stayed flat; when you’re already running well, the gains are marginal. Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom are harder to read. Both bounce year to year without a clear direction. Hollywood Studios posted its best year (0.177) and its worst (0.261) within back-to-back years. Animal Kingdom had a notably strong 2025, but one year isn’t a trend. Sometimes a park just has a good year.

WEB SLINGERS: A Spider-Man Adventure at DCA broke down 1,285 times in 2025. That is 3.5 breakdowns per day, every day, for an entire year. It is the poster child for DLR’s operational philosophy. It also averaged 23 minutes per breakdown. Guests barely notice; you walk past, the queue says temporarily closed, you check back in twenty minutes, it’s running. Whatever is wrong with WEB SLINGERS, they have gotten very fast at un-wronging it.

The most interesting pattern lives in Space Mountain, which exists at both Disneyland and Magic Kingdom. Both versions show the same shift: far fewer breakdowns, but each one takes dramatically longer to resolve. Disneyland’s Space Mountain went from 897 breakdowns in 2022 to 458 in 2025, a 49% drop, but average duration climbed from 23 to 47 minutes. Magic Kingdom’s went from 812 to 298 (down 63%), with duration climbing from 28 to 77 minutes. Two coasts, same ride, same pattern. Something changed in how Space Mountain is maintained, and it wasn’t an accident.

Then there’s Incredicoaster at DCA, which averages 84 minutes per breakdown. You could watch an entire episode of a prestige drama in the time it takes this ride to come back. When Incredicoaster goes down, clear your afternoon.

Disney rides are getting more reliable. Not because the internet told you so; the internet told you the opposite. Because four years of five-minute data across six parks, 130,000 breakdowns, and every tier of ride from Space Mountain to the teacups all point the same direction. The Shame Score dropped 16%. The improvement is real.

At Disneyland Resort, expect frequent short closures. Check back in twenty minutes. At Walt Disney World, breakdowns are rarer but longer; if your ride goes down, pivot to something else. Both coasts are getting better. They just disagree about what “better” means.

This is the first in a three-part series on ride reliability trends across US theme parks. Next: how Universal’s parks compare, and whether Epic Universe is an outlier or a preview.